Fenrir's Blog

Welcome to the blog tracking the Fenrir project

This blog will be used to track and -why not- discuss all the choices, design features and advancements of the project, so you might find both technical posts and random thoughts.

Currently working on:

Signal vs Federation

Recently the guys at Signal have published a blog post about their ideas on federation.

Our ideas differ, so let’s analyze the problem.

Multicast

I finally had some time to better think about multicast transmission and better analyze the problem. And I think I have a solution.

Thesis

I finally finished my master thesis, and the result can be found here.

Feel free to look at it to better understand the Fenrir protocol.

Got Speed?

Every protocol has a limit on how quickly it can deliver things.

So how does Fenrir compare to the classical TCP?

Anonymous Login

Obviously we support anonymous connection. But that’s not the same as an anonymous login.

By “Anonymous login” we mean being able to login to a 3rd party website without revealing our username.

With Fenrir, that’s pretty simple.

libRaptorQ

It took me a lot more than expected, but finally I have a working implementation of the RaptorQ algorithm (RFC630)

Slow Development

Things have been slow in the last two months.

What’s going on? A lot.

DNSSEC

What happens before the handshake? How do we get the information needed to have a secure connection with the right server?

Fenrir does not use the common CA authorities, so where do we get the trust in this system?

Federated Authentication

Today we are going to have an in-depth look at the algorithm behind the federation and how the tokens, the lattices are used.

The algorithm per-se is extremely easy, so we will look at what information we use and how. There’s no cryptography involved here :)

Architecture

Everybody is familiar with the usual client-server architecture, and you might have figured out the “authentication server”-“service”-“client” model in Kerberos and OAuth.

Fenrir further splits the roles, simplifying the work each application has to do and increasing the overall security.