Dear all, In the process of implementing the GNU Name System in Go and implementing the Taler wallet cryptography in "native" libraries independent from GNUnet, we discovered a number of non-standard practices in the GNUnet crypto logic that made compatible implementations unnecessarily difficult. While none of the issues raised security concerns, we decided that clean implementations are crucial and that we should modify the GNUnet C implementation to make this possible.
At the same time, we also decided that GNS should default to using UTF- 8 instead of IDNA (die legacy DNS, die!), and that we should use the opportunity to update our proof-of-work function to be less compatible with ASICs. The resulting code also implements the GNS standard we are documenting in LSD0001 as part of our NGI grant from NLnet. After weeks of preparation, I've decided to 'flip' the switches in the gnunet.git to the new logic today -- simply to give it a bit of a bigger whirl in anticipation of the GNUnet 0.12.0 release expected in mid-December. Please be aware that Git master is thus henceforth INCOMPATIBLE with the 0.11.x GNUnet network, and interactions between old and new peers will result in signature verification failures. 0.11.x peers will NOT be able to communicate with Git master or 0.12.x peers. There could be further last-minute protocol changes, so if you have any that are ready to go in, this week is your merge window. For GNU Taler, this also means that the protocol changes, as Taler uses the EdDSA and RSA cryptography from GNUnet. New wallets using the new crypto are to some extend already available or under "Google review". Happy hacking! Christian
