CJDNS Hyperboria vs Tor - Mesh IPv6 Network Compared to Tor Anonymization

CJDNS was designed to address the problem of internet routing being based on trust in ISPs and backbone operators rather than on cryptographic proofs. In the CJDNS model, every node has a cryptographic identity and communication is encrypted end-to-end without requiring trust in intermediate routers. The intermediate nodes see only encrypted packets and route them toward their destination based on the IPv6 routing hierarchy, without being able to read content.

Tor was designed to address the problem of adversaries correlating network connections to identify who is communicating with whom. Tor's multiple-hop routing prevents this correlation by ensuring no single node knows both the origin and destination of a communication. CJDNS makes no attempt to hide routing metadata; intermediate nodes know the source and destination IPv6 addresses of packets they route.

These are complementary problems. CJDNS solves unauthorized content access; Tor solves traffic analysis. Using both: CJDNS for the underlying transport and Tor for traffic anonymization provides both encryption of content in transit and anonymization of routing metadata.

Install CJDNS from source or packages. The configuration requires specifying peers (other CJDNS nodes) to connect to. Unlike Yggdrasil's automatic peer discovery, CJDNS requires manual peer configuration:

apt install nodejs build-essential
git clone https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns.git && cd cjdns
./do
cp cjdroute /usr/local/sbin/
cjdroute --genconf | tee /etc/cjdroute.conf

Edit /etc/cjdroute.conf to add peers in the connectTo section. Public CJDNS peers are listed in the cjdns GitHub wiki. After starting cjdroute, the VPS gets an fc00::/8 IPv6 address. Other CJDNS nodes on the Hyperboria network are reachable through this address space.

Run services accessible on the CJDNS address by binding to the fc-prefix address. This makes services accessible to other Hyperboria participants while remaining inaccessible to the clearnet internet, creating a private encrypted overlay network for communication between known participants.