Re: [Social-p2p] P2P XMPP

[Dan Brickley]

On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 3:30 PM, Ted Smith <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-07-14 at 09:46 +0200, Dan Brickley wrote:
>> Hi folks
>>
>> Great to see this initiative; it nicely complements the
>> StatusNet-based codebase.
>>
>> I wanted to float a technical possibility. There are already a few
>> mentions of XMPP in the documentation, and in parallel other Social
>> Web efforts are taking XMPP quite seriously. However XMPP as normally
>> deployed typically depends on something playing a 'server' role. While
>> there might be scenarios in which decentralised peers do more of that
>> work, I'd like also to draw attention to "XEP-0174: Serverless
>> Messaging".
>>
>> From http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0174.html --
>>
>>  "This specification defines how to communicate over local or
>> wide-area networks using the principles of zero-configuration
>> networking for endpoint discovery and the syntax of XML streams and
>> XMPP messaging for real-time communication. This method uses DNS-based
>> Service Discovery and Multicast DNS to discover entities that support
>> the protocol, including their IP addresses and preferred ports. Any
>> two entities can then negotiate a serverless connection using XML
>> streams in order to exchange XMPP message and IQ stanzas."
[...]
> This looks really interesting - at worst, it's another transport, but I
> think we could use it for more.

Thanks. I dropped a note to the XMPP "Social" list too,
http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/social/2010-July/000609.html ... both
to seek a sanity check, and to flush out possible collaborators. I
believe the specs around Jingle
(http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0166.html) are also relevant, in that
they're point to point. Somewhat related (and I think more
experimental) is
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-meyer-xmpp-e2e-encryption-02

 "This document specifies "XTLS", a protocol for end-to-end encryption
   of Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) traffic.  XTLS
   is an application-level usage of Transport Layer Security (TLS) that
   is set up using the XMPP Jingle extension for session negotiation and
   transported using any streaming transport as the data delivery
   mechanism.  Thus XTLS treats the end-to-end exchange of XML stanzas
   as a virtual transport and uses TLS to secure that transport,
   enabling XMPP entities to communicate in a way that is designed to
   ensure the confidentiality and integrity XML stanzas.  The protocol
   can be used for secure end-to-end messaging as well as other XMPP
   applications, such as file transfer."

cheers,

Dan