CJDNS is an open source project building a censorship resistance decentralized network, the routing engine has been designed for security, scalability, speed and ease of use, CJDNS runs on top of your ISP network and provides you with an internal IPv6 address generated from a public encryption key.
A virtual network card (TUN device) is used to send data to anyone connected to the network, what makes CJDNS different from other decentralized P2P projects like PirateBox is that it is routable over the current Internet, nodes can be reached anywhere in the world. In the future, as the number of nodes increases, data packets can be sent wireless in ad-hoc mode. No DNS is required to access a node, if DNS is ever implemented it will be made decentralized and secure, at the moment the user only needs to know the IPv6 address and paste it in the browser.
Project MeshNet CJDNS flowchart
Man in the middle attacks are not possible because public key encryption is used to send packets, CJDNS provides privacy too, other users can’t locate people by simply looking up their internal IPv6 address, node operators could track a user down but only if the community helps them out. Unlike the tor network , the node operator that gave someone access to the mesh can deal with abuse and ban people, a CJDNS network abuse policy will have been democratically decided by those who are part of the network, stopping Government interference and frivolous multinational lawsuits. CJDNS is not trying to replace tor, it wants to replace the Internet, the idea is that with all hardware working in P2P mode a single person can’t be intimidated into shutting down the network, there isn’t any central infrastructure that can be attacked.
Like with darknets, to join CJDNS you will first need a friend inside giving you access, once in the network you can connect to everyone else. Hyperboria is the main CJDNS network composed of dozens of nodes. To connect to the IPv6 addresses, Hyperboria sites, you will need to be running CJDNS, it doesn’t matter if your computer is using IPv4 as CJDNS encapsulates IPv6 into IPv4 packets for routing.
The network is resistant to Distributed Denial of Service ( DDoS ) because it has too many nodes to bring down, this makes CJDNS enduring to natural disasters too, there isn’t a single point of failure. CJDNS can be installed in OpenWRT routers, MAC and Linux computers, Windows is being tested on, hardware requirements are low and if you run a node you can host anything that doesn’t go against the community values.