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tele·hash

n. Internet, from telegraph and hashtable

Introduction

Telehash is a 100% open, secure mesh networking technology with these design principles:

  • full end-to-end encryption, all the time
  • strict privacy: no content, identity, or metadata is ever revealed to third parties
  • maximum app/device compatibility: suitable for embedded, mobile, and web usage
  • making privacy the easy choice for developers
  • flexible transport protocols, for compatibility with existing layers
  • native implementations for the widest possible variety of languages/platforms

The telehash team includes collaborators from around the world, many of whom were the principal architects of XMPP. It is intended as a next-generation protocol advancing the original goals of Jabber.

Basic Network

The basic architecture contains application or device instances that each maintain a logical mesh which is just a collection of secure links to other instances. Every endpoint has its own view of the mesh, a link between two instances is private only to them and not shared across the mesh.

The current v3 protocol has these high-level properties:

  • each endpoint has verifiable unique fingerprint (a hashname), a secure universal MAC address
  • provides native tunneling of TCP/UDP sockets, HTTP, object streams, and more
  • facilitates asynchronous and synchronous messaging and eventing
  • supports an automatic peer discovery mode when available on local transports
  • specifies a URI format for initiating new links out-of-band
  • supports bridging and routing privately by default and optionally via a public DHT (draft)
  • integrates native support for JSON Object Signing and Encryption (JOSE) and OpenID Connect

Telehash Stack

The protocol stack is separated into two main areas, a lower level end-to-end encrypted exchange (E3X) that handles all of the security primitives and encrypted messages, and higher application-level definitions for managing a mesh of links that support standard channels, transports, and URIs.

Design Philosophy

The primary idea that drove the creation and development of telehash is the belief that any application instance should be able to easily and securely talk to any other application instance or device, whether they are two instances of the same application, or completely different applications. They should be able to do so directly, and in any environment, from servers to mobile devices down to embedded systems and sensors.

By enabling this freedom for developers as a foundation for their applications, telehash enables the same freedom for the people using them - that the user can connect, share, and communicate more easily and with control of their privacy.

The challenges and complexity today in connecting applications via existing technologies such as APIs, OAuth, and REST are only increasing, often forcing fundamentally insecure, centralized, and closed/gated communication platforms. By adopting telehash, an application immediately has a powerful set of open tools for its own needs, but can also easily enable connectivity to and from applications created by others. These tools include the ability to have friends, sharing, feeds, tagging, search, notifications, discovery, transactions, and other social patterns.

Telehash has a fundamental requirement to remain simple and lightweight in order to support applications running on networked devices and sensors. The design goals also include not forcing any specific architectural pattern such as client-server, centralized/federated/distributed, polling/push, REST, streaming, publish-subscribe, or message passing... any can be used, as telehash simply facilitates secure reliable connectivity between any two or more applications in any networking environment.

## Usage

The word telehash should be pronounced as the root terms would normally be pronounced in the speaker's native dialect.

It is usually written in all lower-case in the sense of a modern version of the word "telephone", both as a generic private communication system that is federated and compatible, and the act of two application instances communicating privately and directly.

 ## Logo

logo-128

The telehash logo was designed and contributed by Jake Ingman and is freely available for apps to use in representing support and current mesh connectivity status.

The official color is #2a7e60.

Change Log

v1

The name and first version of the protocol was established in 2009 by Jeremie Miller and was primarily a DHT-P2P research project.

v2

In 2013 it was significantly updated with a privacy focus as v2.

v3

In 2014 the protocol was refactored and simplified: the wire encryption format was codified as E3X and the DHT functionality was moved into a separate project called blockname.