Ouroboros Frequently Asked Questions: Difference between revisions

From Ouroboros
Jump to navigation Jump to search
No edit summary
No edit summary
 
(25 intermediate revisions by 2 users not shown)
Line 1: Line 1:
= General Remarks =
Ouroboros is a project with the capacity to make fundamental changes to the way we share information in the digital world. When encountering this project for the first time, plenty of people have questions: what it is, how it works, and how it compares to other projects. This is where you'll find the answers to some of the most common questions.


=== A new model should demonstrate new capabilities instead of just existing ones. ===
== Q: How does Ouroboros compare to [Tor, CJDNS, I2P, Wireguard, etc.]? ==
The goal of Ouroboros is to tackle problems in the world of information transfer by re-establishing network architecture at a system level.


Of course, we understand the sentiment, and we are convinced the Ouroboros architecture will prove to have some exciting capabilities, such as hot-swapping a complete underlying network without breaking an end-to-end application connection. But that is not our primary objective -- yet. As of now, we don't have the critical components fully implemented to demonstrate such advanced features, let alone evaluate them to existing technology.
As such, comparing Ouroboros to projects which rely on existing network architecture (IP/TCP, TLS, DNS) is akin to comparing a concrete foundation to a pre-existing structure. It is possible to move these structures onto the foundation (or build new ones!), but it is ineffective to compare Ouroboros to any existent networking protocol before any practical implementations have been built.


At this point, we are more concerned to craft a solid basic understanding of the fundamental principled underlying networks. What the minimal conditions are that make or break certain network functionalities. The current model (OSI / TCP layers) just doesn't cut it. It has little predictive value about what the consequences are going against the 7 layers, and the current Internet does not neatly consist of 5 or 7 layers.
Until implementations exist which properly leverage the capacity of Ouroboros as an infrastructure, it is difficult to make a comparison to the specific use cases addressed by existing network paradigms.


The model we are developing should first explain _why_ the networks that we already have actually work. The Ouroboros model has a different conceptual view, different basic building blocks, put together in a conceptually different way. This is a bit orthogonal to the work carried out by engineers building features. Erwin Schrodinger put it best: ''The task is ... not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.''
== Q: Why are you using C instead of rust / golang / zig / ... ==
Our previous experience was building a RINA stack in C in Linux kernel space (IRATI), so we had a few years of experience developing in a spartan C environment. Since the Ouroboros project was initially targeting a user-space RINA stack that should be portable to constraint IoT devices, we hoped to leverage some of the work/code from IRATI. When we started early in 2016, rust was not really a thing, definitely not on small COTS IoT boards. Today we may or may not choose something else, but even in rust, the nature of what we are designing will require a lot of unsafe code.


= Paper Remarks =
== Q: Do you guys think you can replace TCP/IP? ==
 
No-one can replace TCP/IP. We think the TCP/IP stack is - from a modern day perspective - incredibly rickety. All we can do is take what we learned over the past 25 years and try to come to a better integrated solution for secure and reliable end-to-end packet networking. We have no control over technology adoption, all we can do is provide a possible path for it. Ouroboros runs fine as an overlay on top of TCP/IP. There is no need to throw out your routers and switches. Replacing TCP/IP is not up to us, it's completely up to you.
== Ouroboros claims Unicast and Multicast must be distinct mechanisms. However, these mechanisms interact seamlessly for existing protocols such as IP/ARP and IPv6 (where, in particular, IPv6 packets are transmitted as Ethernet multicast until MAC learning occurs). Isn't this contradictory? ==
 
We need to make a distinction here. The claim which we are making is that the process that is doing either multicast or unicast needs to be aware that it is doing so. In the example given, the application uses IPv6, and IPv6 is doing multicast until MAC learning occurs. It is not the application that is using IPv6 that is a multicast application. The IPv6 protocol
 
 
== Ouroboros seems to ignore how names are used to distinguish multicast/unicast without applications ever knowing (sometimes via name aliases, e.g., DNS) ==
 
 
== Some physical layers natively support multicast and some protocols rely on that very feature, how is this accounted for in Ouroboros? ==
 
 
== The definitions in the paper only mention link weights, what about node weights and weights that are not just a scalar value? ==
 
 
== The authors seem to claim that forwarding is a single hop in a routing table, but it’s the *process* of relaying packets to the next hop that involves selecting ONE of those hops; it isn’t just the set of possible hops ==
 
== The authors seem to claim that the opposite of flat names are hierarchical names. Non-flat names can have many structures, only one of which is hierarchical, e.g., hypercube names are not hierarchical but are structured and routable based on name content. How do you account for this? ==
 
 
== Can the “forwarding layer” can manage congestion control (instead of the protocol performing flow control)? ==
 
== TCP over TCP is known to perform very badly unless the impact of operating retransmission, reordering, flow control, and congestion control at different layers on top of each other is carefully managed. How will Ouroboros overcome this? ==

Latest revision as of 20:29, 12 August 2024

Ouroboros is a project with the capacity to make fundamental changes to the way we share information in the digital world. When encountering this project for the first time, plenty of people have questions: what it is, how it works, and how it compares to other projects. This is where you'll find the answers to some of the most common questions.

Q: How does Ouroboros compare to [Tor, CJDNS, I2P, Wireguard, etc.]?

The goal of Ouroboros is to tackle problems in the world of information transfer by re-establishing network architecture at a system level.

As such, comparing Ouroboros to projects which rely on existing network architecture (IP/TCP, TLS, DNS) is akin to comparing a concrete foundation to a pre-existing structure. It is possible to move these structures onto the foundation (or build new ones!), but it is ineffective to compare Ouroboros to any existent networking protocol before any practical implementations have been built.

Until implementations exist which properly leverage the capacity of Ouroboros as an infrastructure, it is difficult to make a comparison to the specific use cases addressed by existing network paradigms.

Q: Why are you using C instead of rust / golang / zig / ...

Our previous experience was building a RINA stack in C in Linux kernel space (IRATI), so we had a few years of experience developing in a spartan C environment. Since the Ouroboros project was initially targeting a user-space RINA stack that should be portable to constraint IoT devices, we hoped to leverage some of the work/code from IRATI. When we started early in 2016, rust was not really a thing, definitely not on small COTS IoT boards. Today we may or may not choose something else, but even in rust, the nature of what we are designing will require a lot of unsafe code.

Q: Do you guys think you can replace TCP/IP?

No-one can replace TCP/IP. We think the TCP/IP stack is - from a modern day perspective - incredibly rickety. All we can do is take what we learned over the past 25 years and try to come to a better integrated solution for secure and reliable end-to-end packet networking. We have no control over technology adoption, all we can do is provide a possible path for it. Ouroboros runs fine as an overlay on top of TCP/IP. There is no need to throw out your routers and switches. Replacing TCP/IP is not up to us, it's completely up to you.

Retrieved from "https://ouroboros.rocks/mediawiki/index.php?title=Ouroboros_Frequently_Asked_Questions&oldid=1688"