Max Leonard Inden

At FOSDEM 2022 I presented libp2p's hole punching mechanism, overcoming NATs and firewalls with no dependencies on central infrastructure. One year has passed since. We rolled it out to live networks. We launched a large measurement campaign with many volunteers deploying vantage points in their home network, punching holes across the globe.

In this talk I will give an overview of the largest hack of the internet (aka. hole punching), dive into learnings running it on IPFS (~50_000 nodes) and finally present the data collected through our measurement campaign.

If you always wondered how hole punching works, how much more successful UDP is over TCP, whether IPv4 or v6 makes a difference, which ISP is most friendly to p2p and how to overcome symetric NATs, join for the talk!

Connecting from the browser to a public server with a valid TLS certificate is easy. But what if the server has a self-signed certificate? What if it isn't public? What if it is another browser?

This talk covers the intricacies of browser communication beyond the standard browser-to-server use-case. I will give an overview of the many protocols available and how they can be used in a peer-to-peer fashion without sacrificing authenticity, confidentiality or integrity. We will leverage the new WebTransport for secure communication to public servers with self-signed certificates and WebRTC for secure communication to other browsers, using hole puching, without the dependency on central infrastructure.

libp2p is a universal, cross-platform, multi-language, modular peer-to-peer networking library powering multiple large-scale networks, for example IPFS, Ethereum 2, Filecoin or Polkadot.

We will discuss the current state of the project, eyeball the various language implementations, take a look at the many live networks running on top of libp2p today and finally cover the project roadmap for the years to come.

libp2p is a universal, cross-platform, multi-language, modular peer-to-peer networking library powering multiple large-scale networks, for example IPFS.

In the first part of the talk we’ll present the basic building blocks of the library and explain how they fit together. In the second part, we’ll take a closer look at the recently added decentralized hole punching feature, allowing NAT and firewall traversal without the need for any central coordination servers (STUN and TURN).