Announcing FIPS, the Free Internetworking Peering System

https://github.com/jmcorgan/fips

Nostr gives you a sovereign identity. But the network underneath, the IP routing, the DNS, the infrastructure you depend on to reach each other, is still controlled by someone else.

FIPS is a mesh networking protocol that makes a Nostr keypair your network identity. Nodes find each other and route traffic using npubs directly. No DNS registrars, no IP address allocation, no routing authorities. Just keypairs and encrypted links.

Nodes self-organize into a routing tree without any global coordination. You address peers by npub, and unmodified IPv6 applications work transparently: Nostr relays, web browsers, whatever.

Today it runs as a UDP overlay on the existing internet, in order to let you easily test its capabilities. But it is designed from the ground up to directly use arbitrary transports like Ethernet, Wifi, Bluetooth, Tor, and point-to-point links, without any IP stack. We're working on these next, but wanted to get the core capabilities out and tested in the wild.

The FIPS design builds on decades of prior work in mesh networking protocols, traffic engineering and network security, and adapts and combines them to solve the problem of self-sovereign internetworking in a new way.

https://github.com/jmcorgan/fips/blob/master/docs/design/fips-intro.md

This is a v0.1.0 alpha. It has passed extensive simulation testing, small scale deployments, and is ready to be trialed in real world uncontrolled conditions. And if it breaks, you get to keep both pieces...

Rust, MIT licensed, Linux for now.