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libp2p

What is libp2p1

libp2p is a modular system of protocols, specifications and libraries that enable the development of peer-to-peer network applications.

A peer-to-peer network is one in which the participants (referred to as peers or nodes) communicate with one another directly, on more or less “equal footing”.

Transport

At the foundation of libp2p is the transport layer, which is responsible for the actual transmission and receipt of data from one peer to another.

Identity

In a world with billions of networked devices, knowing who you’re talking to is key to secure and reliable communication. libp2p uses public key cryptography as the basis of peer identity, which serves two complementary purposes. First, it gives each peer a globally unique “name”, in the form of a PeerId. Second, the PeerId allows anyone to retrieve the public key for the identified peer, which enables secure communication between peers.

Security

It’s essential that we are able to send and receive data between peers securely, meaning that we can trust the identity of the peer we’re communicating with and that no third-party can read our conversation or alter it in-flight.
libp2p currently supports TLS 1.3 and Noise, though not every language implementation of libp2p supports both of these.

Peer Routing

When you want to send a message to another peer, you need two key pieces of information:
1、their PeerId,
2、 and a way to locate them on the network to open a connection.
Peer routing is the process of discovering peer addresses by leveraging the knowledge of other peers.
In a peer routing system, a peer can either give us the address we need if they have it, or else send our inquiry to another peer who’s more likely to have the answer.
The current stable implementation of peer routing in libp2p uses a distributed hash table to iteratively route requests closer to the desired PeerId using the Kademlia routing algorithm.

Content Discovery

libp2p provides a content routing interface for this purpose, with the primary stable implementation using the same Kademlia-based DHT as used in peer routing.

Messaging / PubSub

Sending messages to other peers is at the heart of most peer-to-peer systems, and pubsub (short for publish / subscribe) is a very useful pattern for sending a message to groups of interested receivers.

libp2p defines a pubsub interface for sending messages to all peers subscribed to a given “topic”. The interface currently has two stable implementations;
1、floodsub uses a very simple but inefficient “network flooding” strategy,
2、and gossipsub defines an extensible gossip protocol. There is also active development in progress on episub, an extended gossipsub that is optimized for single source multicast and scenarios with a few fixed sources broadcasting to a large number of clients in a topic.