The Safe Network Primer

An introductory guide to the world's first fully autonomous data and communications network

Last update: November 2021

Major changes since last update:

Implementation of Digital Bearer Certificates

Implementation of Anti-Entropy

Implementation of conflict-free data types (CRDTs)

Move from pay on GET to pay on PUT when remunerating Nodes

New data CRDT types Register, Multimap

Design for n-of-k user authorization

A brief introduction

Technological progress is a perpetual process of automation and abstraction. Difficult and complex tasks are made simple by software and machines until they are completely taken for granted. Technology moves on, taking down new blockers in the path to progress as it goes. A good example of this is cloud computing, where once complex server administration tasks have been replaced, from the point of view of the consumer, by point-and-click.

The Safe (Secure Access For Everyone) Network takes this further, automating the entire network of interconnected machines, making it autonomous, secure, anonymous and capable of storing, protecting and delivering data without any human involvement at all.

The Safe Network is the vision of MaidSafe, a Scottish software company working in the field of decentralized computer networking. It is an autonomous peer-to-peer network created by linking together users' computers and smartphones that's designed to solve many of the current technical, managerial and societal problems exacerbated by centralized networks: a lack of privacy and data security, censorship and the massive consolidation of control by a few powerful actors.

(In case this sounds familiar, members of MaidSafe acted as advisers for HBO’s Silicon Valley TV series in which a startup tries to reinvent the Internet!)

The Network is ‘trustless’, with no central point of control and no single point of failure. With connectivity and security taken care of, the Network is simple from the point of view of developers, with the burden of having to worry about low-level storage, networking, backups and computing resources removed. For people using the Network to store and share data and messages the burden of ensuring the security of precious information would be drastically reduced.

Anyone with a connected device can use the Network anonymously to store data or peruse public information on it, and anyone (subject to a resource test) can join the Network anonymously as a provider.

The Safe Network is a platform on which new digital worlds can be constructed.

This guide outlines how the Safe Network is constructed to achieve these aims. While it is somewhat technical in places, it's intended very much as an overview, and even those with very little technical knowledge should be able to gain a good working understanding of the Safe Network. For those requiring more depth, there are plenty of pointers as to where they can find the relevant information.

Contents

1. Background and fundamentals

1. A fully autonomous data network

1. Nodes and Clients

1. The architecture of the Safe Network

1. Node Age

1. Encryption and authentication

1. Network-wide consensus not required

1. Safe Network Token and Digital Bearer Certificates

1. Safe Network Anti-Entropy

1. Data types

1. How Safe Network defends against common types of cyberattack

1. The promise of the Safe Network

https://primer.safenetwork.org/

>>14976728

>The Safe Network Primer

>An introductory guide to the world's first fully autonomous data and communications network

>Last update: November 2021

1. The promise of the Safe Network

The Safe Network is still in development. While many features and functionalities have already proven themselves under test conditions others, including Safe Network Token, are still to come. As with any cutting-edge experimental technology, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. But let’s assume for a moment that the Network is successful and is widely adopted for various use cases including Internet browsing, IoT connectivity, data security, personal information management, medical records and more.

What would that world look like? First, most cyber attack strategies deployed today would be dead in the water. DDoS would not work as the Network would simply route around the affected nodes. Viruses and malware would be extremely limited in their depth of penetration. Ransomware would not raise a single dollar. Cyber attacks aimed at disabling national infrastructure or taking control of a driverless car would be extremely hard to pull off. Medical records and other personal data would be ours and ours alone, to share as we see fit. For users there can be a single sign-on to multiple services. XOR networking with opportunistic caching promises faster speeds, data storage should be extremely cheap and the Network will offer high levels of availability. For developers having a single storage architecture to address has the potential to simplify the systems programmer’s job. And data deduplication would allow for both simplicity and resource savings.

"There would be a rebalancing of power from the data-haves to the data have-nots"

The Internet giants of today would no longer be able to harvest our data without our say so, nor could government spooks eavesdrop over their shoulders. There would be a rebalancing of power from the data-haves to the data have-nots. Censorship would be impossible and data could not be erased. Because the cost of entry will be low and access unrestricted, the ongoing net neutrality debate will end, and neutrality will have won the day.

People in places with poor or restricted access to information will have those blockers lifted. Some may even make a decent living earning Safe Network Token. New business models based on consent would spring up in a world where data storage and networking and eventually computing power is a commodity, and the world of information will be a much more level playing field.

Isn’t this all a bit idealistic? Well yes of course, but that’s the nature of visions. Not everything will work as planned and we need to be hard-headed about that. Techno-utopianism is a dangerous thing. There are both predictable and unpredictable consequences of taking on the status quo, and indeed of deploying any new technology, and not all of them will be positive. Nevertheless, given where we are today, and where we are headed with the IoT, something like the Safe Network is most definitely needed to redress the power imbalance and to secure the data-driven future.

Roadmap

As with all experimental research-driven projects the rate of progress is unpredictable, and MaidSafe avoid giving hard deadlines. However, there is a roadmap at https://safenetwork.tech/timeline/ in which the next developments are laid out. The next MVP, Safe Fleming, will allow anyone with a computer and an internet connection to join the Network.

About MaidSafe

MaidSafe is a company founded by David Irvine in 2006 with a mission to provide security and privacy for everyone by building a better digital world. This new platform is the Safe Network, which is the world’s first autonomous and decentralized data network. The Network is made up of the unused hard drive space, processing power and bandwidth of its users. The Safe Network will include storage, peer-to-peer communications, transactions, Internet functionality and a wide variety of apps to name a few of its features. This paper was written and produced by members of the Safe Network Forum independently of MaidSafe.

>>14976728

>>14976740

>The Safe Network Primer

>An introductory guide to the world's first fully autonomous data and communications network

1. Background and fundamentals

Background

Decentralized or peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are not new. Since the release of Napster on June 1, 1999, they have taken the world by storm, particularly for file sharing. These networks allow users from all over the world to connect to each other and share data such as movies, books and music. In 2010 more than half of all Internet traffic was attributed to P2P.

But the use of these technologies is not limited to simple file sharing. Freenet was launched in March, 2000 allowing people to publish decentralized websites (Freesites). Freesites are not stored on central servers but instead are distributed across the machines of the encrypted network's users.

A little after that, the BitTorrent protocol was created by Bram Cohen. BitTorrent was and still is particularly well suited to transferring large files in a P2P fashion, allowing simultaneous downloads from multiple peers.

The next notable development arrived after the financial crash which very nearly brought the global economy to its knees. In 2009 Satoshi Nakamoto released Bitcoin and gave the world a 'trustless' decentralized digital currency that is not controlled by bank, government or institution. The blockchain - the immutable ledger that records all Bitcoin transactions - was something very new, solving at a stroke the difficult and long-standing problem of creating a trustless source of the truth for transactions. The ownership of 'addresses' in the network can be proven by the usage of private keys in a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) - hence the term cryptocurrency; however, connections between Bitcoin nodes are not fully encrypted.

The Safe Network is the next big step in the evolution of P2P networks, combining the vision of decentralized file sharing and decentralized web sites together with an internal cryptocurrency - Safe Network Token (SNT) (formerly known as Safecoin) - and several additional innovations to enhance security, privacy, performance and stability. MaidSafe, a Scottish company with developers around the world, has been researching and developing this project since 2006. Since that time, many more people have come to recognize the vital importance of a global, secure and private decentralized platform for storage and communication.

>>14976728

>>14976740

>>14976758

>The Safe Network Primer

>An introductory guide to the world's first fully autonomous data and communications network

20 Fundamental Principles of the Safe Network

There are a number of core ideas that have driven each stage of the design of the Safe Network. These can be distilled into the following 20 fundamental principles.

The Safe Network will:

Allow a person to create an account and login anonymously and without intervention.

Creating a new account and logging into the Network will never require a third party.

Enable users to securely and with no controlling intermediaries share information and messages.

The Safe Network will never allow third parties to either read or store the information sent by a user without that user’s consent.

Allow the transfer of the Network currency Safe Network Token to any user free of transaction costs.

Enable Users to anonymously create and share data worldwide.

The Network will always ensure that the user has the ability to send transaction messages and posts with a temporary single-use ID that is not linked to any known identity on the Network.

Let anyone browse content anonymously and free of charge and without the need to create an account.

Allow users to associate multiple identities with their account.

Let users utilize any of their identities to send/receive Safe Network Token.

Store data in perpetuity. All public/published data on the Network will be immutable and available on the Network indefinitely.

Never require passwords to be stored on the Network or on machines used to access the Network.

Allow any user, on any machine, to access the Network leaving no trace of their presence or activity on the machine.

Scrub Client IP addresses from the first hop.

As soon as you have connected to the network, your IP address is wiped.

Only accept more Vaults (networked storage provided by users' machines) when it needs them.

This is to prevent a bad actor from flooding the network with poorly performing or malicious Vaults and also to enable the Network to balance its resources automatically according to demand.

Increase farming rewards when it needs more resources (e.g. more Vaults to increase storage capacity) and decrease rewards when resources are plentiful.

This is the primary mechanism for balancing supply and demand.

Rank nodes over time and increase trust in higher ranked nodes.

The aim is to maximize performance and defend against certain attacks.

Not have servers!

The Safe Network will never rely on servers (as the term is traditionally understood) as to do so introduces a third-party weakness that undermines the entire Network.

Digitally sign all transactions.

To ensure that the transactions have been authorized in accordance with the rules of the Network.

Ensure that Client-to-Client direct messages (i.e. those not transmitted via other nodes in the Network) are free.

Never use time as a network tool.

There can be no concept of time in a truly decentralized network without reaching out to centralized servers and services.

Only use encrypted services and encrypted traffic.

Allow real-time upgrades in a secure manner.

The Network will refuse upgrades that could break it.

We expand on these fundamental principles in the chapters that follow. Combined they aim to give all users the freedom to safely store data on the Network, to share information with others securely, to publish websites cheaply and easily and to communicate using secure channels and apps.

For a fuller version of this list see the Safe Network website. https://safenetwork.tech/fundamentals/