2026-07-10 –, Teen Base Camp
The internet is built on centralizing assumptions that create an asymmetric power imbalance, used to great effect by Big Tech, but generally to the detriment of our freedom, power to choose, and ability to maintain strong stewardship of our own data. We will demo IdentiKey's new mesh routers & symmetric P2P protocols, talk about cryptographic keys for identity, and how to reclaim digital sovereignty today.
Overcoming Implicit Authority Structures To Build a P2P Mesh
This is a presentation about the implicit authority behind the modern internet networking stack, and how carefully designed symmetric coordination protocols and key-based identity can solve this. We discuss how to think about and mitigate implicit authority assumptions in networked/distributed protocols, and then talk about naming & identity, and how user-owned cryptographic keys can upend the perverse power dynamics of centralized authority, creating the conditions for data ownership and digital sovereignty.
We then take our treatment of authority-based vs p2p/symmetric systems, and apply it to several real-life engineering use cases: DHCP, service mesh, and identity.
DHCP
We go into the design of one such protocol, DHCP, look at the centralizing factors & implicit authority in its design, and then present a novel peer-to-peer DHCP gossip protocol for ad hoc mesh using CRDT's.
Distributed Service Mesh
Here we get into the design of the Mjolnir Service Mesh. Service namespacing and user identity are actually aspects of the same problem. We talk about the traditional need for a central authority in naming and service discovery, and present a simple symmetric alternative to mDNS (Bonjour/Avahi) for mesh networks.
Key-Based Identity & Data Ownership
Here we talk about the design of IdentiKey and how the design choices retain natural ownership & sovereignty in the digital -- and open up a novel design space for freedom-oriented networked applications. Cryptographic keys for login and verification (for both humans and services/bots) can mitigate most of the need for centralized infrastructure.
Conclusion
We conclude the talk with a discussion of the real-life ramifications of the authority-based model, and a call to action to design our software with digital sovereignty baked in from the start: where users own their data, data is portable across services, anyone can run a service, and the whole thing is permissionless and censorship-resistant.
We plan to demo our mesh routers and secure data vault nodes!
Duke is a distributed systems engineer working on the IdentiKey Network, a socio-technical stack designed to create the conditions for everyone to be able to realize their creative potential and more fully express their innate gifts. As an engineer, Duke has worked on cryptography at PGP, payments and encryption at Amazon, large-scale infrastructure for Playstation Network, etc.
He has led teams working on non-custodial wallet and key management systems for Nasdaq Private Markets, Holochain, and Good Money Bank, and founded Resource Network, launching a mutual credit cryptocurrency exchange network to real-world businesses. He helped draft the initial spec that became the DID identity standard, and is building a set of distributed network protocols to enable P2P digital sovereignty for anyone and everyone, so we can use the internet together without the weird karma and onerous techno-feudal authority structures.
His mission is to bring non-coercive collaborative models of work and co-creation into the world.