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About

Open Gensokyo Network is a set of protocols and infrastructure that lets services be reached across the existing Internet while staying open, compatible and private.

Principles

  • Open. The protocols and implementations are open; anyone can implement them and run the services and infrastructure themselves. A service’s identity can be self-certifying, so trusting it does not depend on any certificate authority.
  • Compatible. Built on QUIC, HTTP/3 and TLS. New capabilities are added through negotiated extensions; with peers that do not support them, connections work like ordinary ones.
  • Private. Connections reveal as little as possible to the network and to the infrastructure they pass through, down to which service a client is reaching.

Self-certifying identity

A service can hold an identity that does not depend on certificate authorities. Its name is derived from the identity’s own origin, and every later change, such as a new key, is a signed update that clients verify themselves. No certificate authority or domain registrar sits in the chain of trust. As a result:

  • A misissued certificate or a tampered DNS answer cannot impersonate the service.
  • The service rotates its keys without asking anyone, and a key it stops endorsing is no longer accepted within a bounded time.
  • The identity stays the same when the service’s domain, host or hosting changes.

Services identified only by a domain name keep using ordinary certificates.

Status

The project is in its design phase, and there is no usable release yet. Design write-ups and development notes are published on the blog. Experimental code, such as nitori, is developed in the open on GitHub.

Support

Starspun Works provides administrative support for the project.

License

Unless stated otherwise, text on this site is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Code snippets are dual-licensed under the MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses. The site source is on GitHub.

Privacy

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Contact

Questions, corrections and design feedback are welcome on GitHub.