Latest posts of: ryankung

One year ago, I introduced the Rings network on the Cryptography mailing
list (
https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2022-October/037958.html),
and now I'm here to show what we have done in the past year.

First, let me reintroduce my project.

The Rings network (https://github.com/RingsNetwork/rings-node) is a fully
decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) network. I emphasize the word "fully"
because Rings nodes can run on arbitrary devices, especially in web
browsers. The code is written in Rust and can be compiled into WebAssembly.
The transport layer is also browser-friendly, based on the WebRTC protocol,
enabling direct connections between browsers (we have a demo illustrating
how the handshake works: https://rings.rs/rings-wasm-p2p/).

Secondly, let me highlight what we have achieved this year.

1.) Strong Rings DHT: The Distributed Hash Table (DHT) is based on the
Chord algorithm, and we have incorporated the work of Pamela Zave (
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.06461.pdf) to enhance its robustness.

2.) WASM and FFI Client: We now not only support WASM exports but also
offer support for Foreign Function Interface (FFI). This means that
developers can easily use our network in any environment or with any
language, be it in a browser or native, with languages like Python or
Haskell.

3.) dWeb / TcpProxy: A year ago, we had a simple HTTP proxy implementation
based on one-time string input/output. Now, we support TcpProxy, which is
based on DIDs (Decentralized Identifiers) and can establish a TCP tunnel
between any two nodes.

4.) Services Store / Lookup: While our primary focus is not on storage, the
Rings Network has implemented basic storage functionality primarily for
service discovery and registration. For example, a service providing an
IPFS forward gateway can be registered as sha1("IPFS_GATEWAY").

5.) Session and Abstract Account: Rings' design principle is to keep
programs from interacting with private keys directly. So, we achieve
authorization and abstract account by having users sign a delegated
keypair. We now support users to authenticate using various elliptic curve
encryption algorithms, including secp256k1, secp256r1, ed25519, and their
variants.

6.) Browser Extension: We now have a browser extension that essentially
works. You can find it at https://github.com/RingsNetwork/rings_ext_v2. It
launches a node in the background and injects a "Rings" object into the
window object in the browser, allowing the node to stay online continuously.

Third, I will introduce what is the next move of the Rings network.

In the upcoming development process, we have three plans:

1. Continuously improve the availability and user-friendliness of
nodes, including providing better TCPProxy tools, dweb tools. They should
be well-documented.

2. Optimize the browser extension; the current interface is not very
appealing, and its functionality is not very intuitive. We also plan to
provide more demos based on the extension.

3. Implement the DRanking protocol. The DRanking protocol is a new
sampling protocol designed by us. It's inspired by the ranking protocol of
eDonkey but work in decentralized way. If you're interested, you can take a
look at our draft paper:
https://github.com/RingsNetwork/whitepaper/blob/master/pos.pdf

The Rings Network is a project that I am deeply passionate about and
committed to for the long term. It still has a long journey ahead. We
currently have only two or three full-time developers. If anyone has any
ideas about the future of the Rings Network, please feel free to share
them. If you wish to become a contributor to the Rings Network, you are
also welcome to join us.

Our repo is available at:https://github.com/RingsNetwork/rings-node

And white paper:https://github.com/RingsNetwork/whitepaper/blob/master/rings.pdf