Preface — GNUnet documentation

# Preface

This collection of manuals describes GNUnet, a framework for secure peer-to-peer networking with the high-level goal to provide a strong foundation for a global, distributed network that provides security and privacy. GNUnet in that sense aims to replace the current Internet protocol stack. Along with an application for secure publication of files, it has grown to include all kinds of basic applications for the foundation of a new Internet.

## About this book

The books (described as “book” or “books” in the following) bundled as the “GNUnet Reference Manual” are based on the historic work of all contributors to previous documentation of GNUnet. It is our hope that the content is described in a way that does not require any academic background, although some concepts will require further reading.

Our (long-term) goal with these books is to keep them self-contained. If you see references to Wikipedia and other external sources (except for our academic papers) it means that we are working on a solution to describe the explanations found there which fits our use-case and licensing.

Previously the documentation was contained in Drupal books, on the old website. This format was considered unmaintainable for the future, so Texinfo was chosen. You might find old and very old sections in here in addition to more recent content. It took a long time to finish the move to Texinfo (from Drupal to LaTeX to wrong Texinfo output dump to good Texinfo) and only recently (late 2018, early 2019) content checking started. We apologize to the reader for any inconvenience and hope you apply logic where bad advice from 10 years ago can be found (pipe to sudo to install software is one example). Patches (contributions) to this documentation are more than welcome!

The first chapter (“Preface”) as well as the second chapter (“Philosophy”) give an introduction to GNUnet as a project, what GNUnet tries to achieve. “Key Concepts” explains the key concepts in GNUnet. These three chapters are the most complete in the documentation. They are followed by chapters which explain specific parts of GNUnet (and need more work): “Installing GNUnet”, “GNUnet Contributors Handbook” and “GNUnet Developer Handbook”.

## Contributing to this book

The GNUnet Reference Manual is a collective work produced by various people throughout the years.

The version you are reading is derived from many individual efforts hosted on one of our old websites. In the end it was considered to be impractical to read by those who required the information. With the conversion to Texinfo — the version you are reading right now — we hope to address this in the longterm. Texinfo is the documentation language of the GNU project.

While it can be intimidating at first and look scary or complicated, it is just another way to express text format instructions.

We encourage you to take this opportunity and learn about Sphinx, learn about GNUnet, and one word at a time we will arrive at a book which explains GNUnet in the least complicated way to you.

Even when you don’t want to or can’t learn Sphinx, you can contribute. Send us an Email or join our IRC chat room on freenode and talk with us about the documentation (the preferred way to reach out is the mailinglist, since you can communicate with us without waiting on someone in the chatroom). One way or another you can help shape the understanding of GNUnet without the ability to read and understand its sourcecode.

## Introduction

GNUnet in its current version is the result of almost 20 years of work from many contributors. So far, most contributions were made by volunteers or people paid to do fundamental research. At this stage, GNUnet remains an experimental system where significant parts of the software lack a reasonable degree of professionalism in its implementation. Furthermore, we are aware of a significant number of existing bugs and critical design flaws, as some unfortunate early design decisions remain to be rectified. There are still known open problems; GNUnet remains an active research project.

The project was started in 2001 when some initial ideas for improving Freenet’s file-sharing turned out to be too radical to be easily realized within the scope of the existing Freenet project. We lost our first contributor on 11.9.2001 as the contributor realized that privacy may help terrorists. The rest of the team concluded that it was now even more important to fight for civil liberties. The first release was called “GNet” – already with the name GNUnet in mind, but without the blessing of GNU we did not dare to call it GNUnet immediately. A few months after the first release we contacted the GNU project, happily agreed to their governance model and became an official GNU package.

Within the first year, we created GNU libextractor, a helper library for meta data extraction which has been used by a few other projects as well. 2003 saw the emergence of pluggable transports, the ability for GNUnet to use different mechanisms for communication, starting with TCP, UDP and SMTP (support for the latter was later dropped due to a lack of maintenance). In 2005, the project first started to evolve beyond the original file-sharing application with a first simple P2P chat. In 2007, we created GNU libmicrohttpd to support a pluggable transport based on HTTP. In 2009, the architecture was radically modularized into the multi-process system that exists today. Coincidentally, the first version of the ARM service (ARM: Automatic Restart Manager) was implemented a day before systemd was announced. From 2009 to 2014 work progressed rapidly thanks to a significant research grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft. This resulted in particular in the creation of the R5N DHT, CADET, ATS and the GNU Name System. In 2010, GNUnet was selected as the basis for the secushare online social network, resulting in a significant growth of the core team. In 2013, we launched GNU Taler to address the challenge of convenient and privacy-preserving online payments. In 2015, the pretty Easy privacy (pEp) project announced that they will use GNUnet as the technology for their meta-data protection layer, ultimately resulting in GNUnet e.V. entering into a formal long-term collaboration with the pEp Foundation. In 2016, Taler Systems SA, a first startup using GNUnet technology, was founded with support from the community.

GNUnet is not merely a technical project, but also a political mission: like the GNU project as a whole, we are writing software to achieve political goals with a focus on the human right of informational self-determination. Putting users in control of their computing has been the core driver of the GNU project. With GNUnet we are focusing on informational self-determination for collaborative computing and communication over networks.

The Internet is shaped as much by code and protocols as it is by its associated political processes (IETF, ICANN, IEEE, etc.). Similarly its flaws are not limited to the protocol design. Thus, technical excellence by itself will not suffice to create a better network. We also need to build a community that is wise, humble and has a sense of humor to achieve our goal to create a technical foundation for a society we would like to live in.

## Project governance

GNUnet, like the GNU project and many other free software projects, follows the governance model of a benevolent dictator. This means that ultimately, the GNU project appoints the GNU maintainer and can overrule decisions made by the GNUnet maintainer. Similarly, the GNUnet maintainer can overrule any decisions made by individual developers. Still, in practice neither has happened in the last 20 years for GNUnet, and we hope to keep it that way.

The current maintainers of GNUnet are:

- Christian Grothoff

- Martin Schanzenbach

The GNUnet project is supported by GNUnet e.V., a German association where any developer can become a member. GNUnet e.V. serves as a legal entity to hold the copyrights to GNUnet. GNUnet e.V. may also choose to pay for project resources, and can collect donations as well as choose to adjust the license of the software (with the constraint that it has to remain free software). In 2018 we switched from GPL3 to AGPL3, in practice these changes do not happen very often.

## Typography

When giving examples for commands, shell prompts are used to show if the command should/can be issued as root, or if “normal” user privileges are sufficient. We use a # for root’s shell prompt, a % for users’ shell prompt, assuming they use the C-shell or tcsh and a $ for bourne shell and derivatives.