An implementation of a protocol for Cory Doctorow's LoveDaresNot
CAUTION: This is a PROTOTYPE and a DEMONSTRATION. This software should NOT be used for actual anonymous consensus processes and should be assumed to be vulnerable to all sorts of unknown attacks, both to the software itself and to the protocols it uses. Its purpose is to facilitate a conversation about the protocols and to provide a baseline of functionality for others to replicate in actually secure software.
This implementation of LoveDaresNot is a simple Flask-based web app that is expected to be run reverse proxied through an HTTPS server such as Caddy. It assumes that all connections are secure and encrypted, and therefore does not perform any actual encryption itself.
The app presents a locally accessible web UI which the user can use to perform single round yes/no rating of consensus items that have been proposed external to the program.
The software also provides an automatic multiround system for communicating consensus items to the participants in a fully anonymous way layered on top of the single round protocol.
This implementation does not provide any sort of identity management tools: the only way to establish a set of consensors is by manually providing the list of IP addresses for the consensors. Each consensor is then contacted and either a single round consensus is set up, or a multi-round listener is set up.
The inter-consensor communication happens via endpoints under the /api
path, while the local endpoints are directly under /.
The use of the app is separated into three main stages.
The first stage involves setting up a group of consensors who are participating in the consensus process. This establishes an on going automatic multiround process that makes it possible for the consensors to propose consensus items. The second stage involves proposing consensus items. The third state involves voting on those items.
In stage 1, the IP addresses of the consensors are entered into the setup form by the person managing the consensus process. They submit the form, and their computer communicates with the IP addresses and establishes a consensus process among them.
In stage 2, which can be repeated arbitrarily many times, a consensus item is proposed. The consensus item is entered into the New Snot Dare form, and on submitting it, it is then sent to the other participants via the automatic multiround process.
In stage 3, a consensus item is voted on by the consensors. When a consensor gives their vote, it is appropriately decomposed into the relevant data to send to the other consensors and then sent. When consensors receive data, they combine it with what they already have, and whenever all of the consensors' data has been received, the consensor sends a message with the apparent consensus result.
The software is broken into three main components:
- the server, which manages the UIs and the API
- the protocol interface, which provides a concrete interface to running the protocol in a way abstracted from the particular substrate, transport mechanism, UI, etc.
- the round algorithms, which provides a protocol-independent means to compute the individual pieces of information such as whether or not there is consensus and what the content of a consensus item is.
The third component, the round algorithms, are precisely those components of the protocol which do not rely on the act of communication, and which therefore constitute the mathematical core of the protocol. The protocol interface therefore simply composes the round algorithms together in appropriate ways as part of a communicative process, and does not itself contain any real protocol logic outside of structuring the communication.