Everyone Should Build Their Own Network Stack
In this side entry of the ISP@Home series, the author revives DNet, a hand-rolled network stack abandoned for four years, and deploys it on DN42 to serve as an authoritative DNS server. The stack handles Ethernet frames, ARP, IPv4, ICMP, UDP, and a basic DNS server, now answering real queries for the domain 42420167.xyz. The post also details a migration to Debian with Docker Compose and pyinfra for managing DN42 services, and reflects on the lack of real applications in DN42.
So I believe, in a truly decentralized network, everyone should implement their own unique network stack and use it to access the internet.
- intrasight
My first job was at Westinghouse instrumenting a nuclear power plant. Our entire hardware-software package was a freebie given to the customer as part of a $200 million refueling contract (and that's in 1988 dollars). We, a team of 10, created a bespoke application stack which was effectively a web browser. The client machines were Sun 3 workstations. The server was some industrial mini computer that didn't have a TCP/IP stack - so we did in fact have to roll our own network stack.
- _pdp_
Everyone should build their own ** is the general advise I would give just about anything. Otherwise it is hard to appreciate how much effort it goes into things that we take for granted.
Everything looks simple from the outset until you try to build it yourself.
- znnajdla
The real nightmare scenario is not just finding a vulnerability in the Linux network stack but finding vulnerabilities at the protocol level in TCP/IP itself or HTTP. That’s a problem that cannot be fixed. Has there ever been a precedent for this in computing?
- znnajdla
This article might be a bit tongue-in-cheek but it's actually something I've been thinking seriously about for a while. I can imagine a future where every country and company writes their own operating system and that might actually be a very good thing. There is a security advantage in not using popular technology stacks and rebuilding everything public-facing in-house. Because with Mythos-level AI capabilities, it is almost guaranteed that anyone with access to Mythos/Cyber can find a zero day in your stack. If your stack is proprietary and bespoke with no public access to source code it's much harder to find vulnerabilities, because they can only probe your public facing interfaces.
- Ekaros
I would seriously recommend against building your own network stack for production use. Or writing your own web server for production use. Or database (whatever SQL or NoSQL) also for production use.
These sort of things are more complicated than you could expect and have plentiful pitfalls. Whatever you can do in reasonable amount of time is probably not that good compared to existing alternatives.
If you have actually pressing reason to build one and are ready and have means to spend time and effort on it go ahead. But carefully consider the effort needed...