[messaging] First Pre-Release of coniks-go (0.1.0)

[Ian Miers]

Nice work. Glad to hear this isn't dead.

Anyone looking at  deploying this should give a serious look at CONAME (
https://github.com/yahoo/coname.)  as well, which was developed at
yahoo/google as part of end-to-end and is in large part  based on CONIKS.
It's also written in go, was aimed at deployment on real cloud
infrastructure with a distributed database backend,  and offered different
scalability trade offs that are far better suited to deployment at scale.
I think there is also a javascript client *somewhere*.

As I recall the rough difference was : Unlike CONIKS, where users had to
check every version of the tree for consistency, dename/coname allowed
users to merely check a counter attached to their key entry  in the latest
tree and see that it had not been incremented. Other dedicated verifiers
were responsible for checking that counter values were correct over
multiple version of the tree. This greatly reduced the load on both the
server and the bandwidth requirements for clients. At any reasonable scale,
having every user download log(n) elements in a tree every epoch seemed
prohibitive, hence the design tweak.

 The cost of this was it was much harder to completely hide the number of
users added to the tree in a given epoch.   Surprisingly, completely hiding
such information was not a particularly pressing  concern during
development.

There was a thread on it with far mere details here
https://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/messaging/2015/001771.html.

I didn't work on this project, I was just around during its development, so
my description may be a bit off.

Thanks,
Ian

On Mon, Dec 5, 2016 at 2:17 PM Marcela Melara <melara at cs.princeton.edu>
wrote:

Hi everyone,

We are happy to announce our first release of coniks-go, a
re-implementation of CONIKS [1] in Golang:
https://github.com/coniks-sys/coniks-go/releases/tag/0.1.0

This project started as a Google Summer of Code project in 2016 as a
collaboration between the TorMessenger Project, Princeton University, and
the EPFL with the goal of integrating CONIKS into Tor Messenger [1].
Coding-wise most heavy lifting was done by Huy [2] with the mentorship of
Marcela [3], Arlo [3], and Ismail [3].

Although, coniks-go certainly still has some open issues and rough edges
[4] we feel that now is a good time for a first release to get some early
feedback from the community and potential collaborators on board.

Find the project’s code and further pointers to the (API) documentation [5]
here:
https://github.com/coniks-sys/coniks-go

Feedback on the implementation is much appreciated. Feel free to comment
and to ask questions here on the mailing list or directly open issues on
Github [6].

For usage instructions please have a look at the project’s Readme [7].

To get an idea of the next steps for this project, we invite you to look at
the project’s Github milestones [8] as well as our past developer meeting
notes [9]. We also plan to continue working on a Tor Messenger integration.

Looking forward to your feedback,
The CONIKS team [10]

[1] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-messenger-020b2-released
[2] https://twitter.com/Celeron633
[3] https://twitter.com/mas0mel, https://twitter.com/arlolra,
https://twitter.com/KreuzUQuer
[4] http://github.com/coniks-sys/coniks-go/issues
[5] https://godoc.org/github.com/coniks-sys/coniks-go
[6] https://github.com/coniks-sys/coniks-go/issues/new
[7] https://github.com/coniks-sys/coniks-go/blob/master/README.md
[8] https://github.com/coniks-sys/coniks-go/milestones
[9] https://github.com/coniks-sys/coniks-go/wiki/Developer-Meeting-Notes
[10] https://coniks.cs.princeton.edu/team.html
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