pinecone/docs/introduction.md

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Introduction

Pinecone is an implemenatation of the Sequentially Networked Edwards Key (SNEK) name-independent routing scheme that combines two network topologies in order to build an efficient and scalable overlay network.

Pinecone is:

• Name-independent:

  • Node identifiers are not related to the physical network topology;
  • They do not change as the node moves around the network;
  • The address space is considered to be global — there is no subnetting;

• Built up of equal players:

  • Nodes will forward traffic on behalf of other nodes;
  • There are no specific points of centralisation;
  • A node can join a larger network by connecting to any other node;

• Self-healing:

  • Tolerates node mobility far better than Batman-adv, Babel and many other routing protocols;
  • Alternative paths will be discovered automatically if possible when nodes go offline or connections are lost.

• Transport-agnostic:

  • The only requirements for a peering today are that it is stream-oriented and reliable;
  • Any connection medium that can offer these semantics is appropriate for a peering, including TCP over regular IP networks, WebSockets, Bluetooth L2CAP (with infinite retransmit) or RFCOMM etc.

Note, however, that Pinecone is:

• Not anonymous:

  • Anonymity networks make significant trade-offs in order to achieve anonymity, both in overall complexity and in path/routing cost, which are unacceptable in resource-constrained environments;
  • It is not a goal of the Matrix project to guarantee anonymity — at best Matrix can provide pseudonymity and the same is true with Pinecone public keys;

• Not strongly resistant to traffic analysis:

  • Although traffic packet contents will be encrypted end-to-end by default, the source and destination fields in the packet headers are visible to intermediate nodes;
  • In some cases, source addresses could be sealed/encrypted, although this is not implemented today;

• Not fully resilient against malicious nodes:

  • If a node peers with malicious nodes which (for instance) drop traffic, then connectivity will inevitably be disrupted. This can never be fully mitigated (for instance, if you are in a 2 node network and the other node is malicious, there is nothing you can do) — but work is ongoing to detect and route around malicious behaviour where possible.

The Pinecone routing scheme effectively is built up of two major components:

• A global spanning tree:

  • Provides efficient, low-stretch and strictly loop-free routing;
  • Effective means of exchanging path setup messages, even before SNEK bootstrap has taken place;

• A virtual snake (or SNEK) — a single-linked linear routing topology:

  • Provides resilient public key-based routing across the overlay network.