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Constellation

Constellation is a self-managing, peer-to-peer system in which each node:

  • Hosts a number of NaCl (Curve25519) public/private key pairs.

  • Automatically discovers other nodes on the network after synchronizing with as little as one other host.

  • Synchronizes a directory of public keys mapped to recipient hosts with other nodes on the network.

  • Exposes a public API which allows other nodes to send encrypted bytestrings to your node, and to synchronize, retrieving information about the nodes that your node knows about.

  • Exposes a private API which:

    • Allows you to send a bytestring to one or more public keys, returning a content-addressable identifier. This bytestring is encrypted transparently and efficiently (at symmetric encryption speeds) before being transmitted over the wire to the correct recipient nodes (and only those nodes.) The identifier is a hash digest of the encrypted payload that every receipient node receives. Each recipient node also receives a small blob encrypted for their public key which contains the Master Key for the encrypted payload.

    • Allows you to receive a decrypted bytestring based on an identifier. Payloads which your node has sent or received can be decrypted and retrieved in this way.

    • Exposes methods for deletion, resynchronization, and other management functions.

  • Supports a number of storage backends including LevelDB, BerkeleyDB, SQLite, and Directory/Maildir-style file storage suitable for use with any FUSE adapter, e.g. for AWS S3.

  • Uses mutually-authenticated TLS with modern settings and various trust models including hybrid CA/tofu (default), tofu (think OpenSSH), and whitelist (only some set of public keys can connect.)

  • Supports access controls like an IP whitelist.

Conceptually, one can think of Constellation as an amalgamation of a distributed key server, PGP encryption (using modern cryptography,) and Mail Transfer Agents (MTAs.)

Constellation’s current primary application is to implement the “privacy engine” of Quorum, a fork of Ethereum with support for private transactions that function exactly as described in this README. Private transactions in Quorum contain only a flag indicating that they’re private and the content-addressable identifier described here.

Constellation can be run stand-alone as a daemon via constellation-node, or imported as a Haskell library, which allows you to implement custom storage and encryption logic.