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The most important thing in the modern world is information. The ability to communicate freely with others. The internet has provided humanity with the ability to spread information globally, but there are many people who try (and sometimes succeed) to stifle the flow of information. The most important thing in the modern world is information. The ability to communicate freely with others. The internet has provided humanity with the ability to spread information globally, but there are many people who try (and sometimes succeed) to stifle the flow of information.
Internet censorship comes in many forms, state censorship, corporate consoldiation of media, threats of violence, network exploitation (e.g. denial of service attacks). Internet censorship comes in many forms, state censorship, corporate consolidation of media, threats of violence, network exploitation (e.g. denial of service attacks).
To prevent censorship or loss of information, these measures must be in place: To prevent censorship or loss of information, these measures must be in place:
* Resistence to censorship of underlying infrastructure or hosts * Resistance to censorship of underlying infrastructure or of network hosts
* Inability to violently coerce human(s) behind the information (ex. law enforcement or personal threats "doxxing") * Anonymization of users by default
* The Inability to violently coerce human users (personal threats/"doxxing", or totalitarian regime censorship)
* To reduce metadata to a minimum, a system should anonymize its users by default * Economic availability. A system should not rely on a single device to be constantly online, and should not be overtly expensive to use. The majority of people in the world own cell phones, but comparatively few own personal computers, particularly in developing countries.
* Economic availability. A system should not rely on a single device to be constantly online, and should not be overtly expensive to use. The majority of people in the world own cell phones, but comparatively few own personal computers, particuarly in developing countries. There are many great projects that tackle decentralization and privacy issues, but there are none which tackle all of the above issue. Some of the existing networks have also not worked well in practice, or are more complicated than they need to be.
# Onionr Design Goals
When designing Onionr we had these goals in mind:
* Anonymous Blocks
* Difficult to determine block creator or users regardless of transport used
* Default Anonymous Transport Layer
* Tor and I2P
* Transport agnosticism
* Default global sync, but can configure what blocks to seed
* Spam resistance
* Encrypted blocks
# Onionr Design
(See the spec for specific details)
## General Overview
At its core, Onionr is merely a description for storing data in self-verifying packages ("blocks"). These blocks can be encrypted to a user (or self), encrypted symmetrically, or not at all. Blocks can be signed by their creator, but regardless, they are self-verifying due to being identified by a sha3-256 hash value; once a block is created, it cannot be modified.
Onionr exchanges a list of blocks between all nodes. By default, all nodes download and share all other blocks, however this is configurable.
## Blocks
Onionr blocks are very simple. They are structured in two main parts: a metadata section and a data section, with a line feed delimiting where metadata ends and data begins. Metadata defines what kind of data is in a block, signature data, encryption settings, and other arbitrary information.
For encryption, Onionr uses ephemeral Curve25519 keys for key exchange and XSalsa20-Poly1305 as a symmetric cipher, or optionally using only XSalsa20-Poly1305.
# Issues With Existing Software
There are many great projects that tackle decentralization and privacy issues, but there are none which tackle all of the above issues.
## Tor/I2P
Tor and I2P are both great "onion routers" that protect privacy, however these are mainly transport projects. Tor and I2P do not provide decentralization of data on their own, as they only transport data and provide a rendevous. "Hidden services", being hosted on central servers, often do not last long, as they are reliant on only 1 machine being online, which also increases an attacker's ability to unmask them.