Rust libp2p and tokio demo

This repository contains code to show basic usage of the async programming using tokio and p2p - libp2p library in Rust. The docs for the crate can be found here. This code base contains a simple implementation demonstrating the use. Here we have a simple stdio based implementation that lets peers create and share Memos. A memo is a simple note with a title and body. Notes can be public if you publish the Memo or private. Public Memos can be looked up by any peer and can also be shared with peers.

Showcasing Fundamentals and Concepts

• Rust fundamentals
• async programming
• Using libp2p
• Using the noise protocol for encryption.

How it works

Our goal is to share memos which contains a title and body. We create nodes using libp2p. Each node starts up and publishes itself on mdns and creates a peer_id which is an identifier that uniquely identifies the node's private key. Each node binds to the ip address and starts a pub/sub subscription. The communication between peers is encrypted using the noise protocl. The messages passed are json messages. Each client recieves messages and based on the mode value of the message decices how the message needs to be routed. Each message type has its handler which processes the message. The interesting part is the use of asyncio to make the code event driven and not block on io waits. The use of mDNS to discover peers available.

Docs

Docs can be found in the docs folder and on github pages.

Running the code

Currently there is nopublished binaries. We need to run this on two or more nodes on the same network. We can run it using :

RUST_LOG=info cargo run

The following commands are available via stdin.

• ls p - List Peers.
• ls m - List local memos.
• ls m all - List all public memos from known peers.
• ls m {peer_id} - List all public memos from peer specified by peer_id.
• create m Title|Body - Create a new memo.
• publish m {id} - Set the public flag on the memo and publish to all known

Limitations

This is a very simple and not considered production worthy or secure.

• No implementation of commandline parsing to select the storage json for Memo.json
• The implementation of autoincrementing id's for memos is purely local and does not take into account id collisions between peers etc.
• Security - Although the communication between peers is encrypted very little is done in the way of authenticating peers.