For transparency and community alignment, here’s the update that the libp2p team provided in the Ethereum 2.0 Implementers Call #17!
gossipsub asynchronous validators; this is something a few of you asked for and we’ve implemented recently. PR is under review, and we’ll be bubbling up this functionality to the daemon in the next weeks.
We recently merged the TLS 1.3 spec, as well as the reference implementation in Go. We’ve introduced an experimental flag in IPFS, which we’ll be using to roll this feature out slowly in the public network and conduct canary tests.
We hired a security firm to audit libp2p. They’re auditing most of libp2p with the exception of SecIO, which we’ll be phasing out and discouraging in favor of TLS 1.3 once the experiment is successful.
We’re interested in incorporating Noise handshakes, so if you have experience here and want to collaborate, contact me as we might produce a devgrant for this.
We now have a dedicated engineer (@yusef) getting our specs cleaned up and writing specs for unspecified areas. Yay! We’re putting together an impact plan, and we’ll publish it as soon as it’s solid.
We’ve also made progress with our test lab — a tool we crafted to test libp2p at scale. The next step is network simulation. There are several actors in the decentralised space in need of a common low-level API that can be used programmatically to configure virtual NICs, link them, set up latency, packet loss, jitter, etc. from orchestrators to test distributed systems under a variety of network conditions. I’d personally like to start an open interest group around this with the goal of building a standard API for this.
Our friends at 0x and Pions are collaborating to bring go-libp2p to the browser by making it run nicely in WASM. One thing they’ve done is create a WebRTC direct transport to communicate with backends without needing signalling servers. An aspect we’ve discussed a little bit is decentralised signalling for STUN-style hole punching. If you have thoughts about this, reach out.
Last but not least, I wanted to put the upcoming IPFS Camp up on your radar. It’s a four-day hacker retreat taking place in beautiful Barcelona at the end of June, between 27th and 30th. There will be a dedicated course for libp2p hackers that covers the A-Z of libp2p, as well a lot of insightful workshops and discussions about challenges and upcoming features of peer-to-peer networking. If you’d like to join, ping me and we’ll get an application going.