mimblewimble/grin

Add TLS to peer-to-peer connections

Open

#1420 opened on Aug 25, 2018

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 (3 comments) (1 reaction) (0 assignees)Rust (4,876 stars) (991 forks)batch import
enhancementgood first issuehelp wanted

Description

The goal is to improve privacy by making packet inspections a lot harder. In countries where cryptocurrencies or anonymous cryptocurrencies are illegal, this could be very important.

Ulttimately we could use Kovri or something similar, but this gets us 80% there for almost no performance penalty with what should just be very little code.

To preempt some comments about TLS security (which isn't great), this is only for privacy and we can support only a very small subset of known good cyphers.

Contributor guide

Tech stack
rust
Domain
backendsecurityblockchain
Issue type
feature
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
4
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
over 1 week
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
stale
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
mostly clear
Prerequisites
RustTLS/SSLnetworking
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
30
Research direction
Implement TLS for peer to peer connections in Grin's networking layer. Likely requires modifying the existing P2P module (e.g., 'p2p/' or 'net/') to wrap TCP streams with TLS using a Rust TLS library such as rustls or native tls. The implementation should support a limited set of strong ciphersuites as mentioned in the issue. Ensure that the change is backward compatible and does not break existing non TLS connections.