GLP Networking API Specification

Dan Bachar, Ehud Shapiro

Multiagent deterministic GLP (madGLP) runs Grassroots Logic Programs (GLP) as agents that communicate solely by asynchronous message passing, and assumes fair delivery: every message sent is eventually delivered. Each agent runs on a person's smartphone, named by the person's public key. A grassroots platform depends on no global resource but the network, so agents must reach one another over Bluetooth Low Energy, on a local network, and across the Internet from behind NAT, via rendezvous servers anyone can run. What madGLP requires of such a network, and what the network requires of the platform, has not been specified. We specify the networking layer beneath madGLP. Anything that can be done in GLP is done in GLP: the layer provides only what GLP cannot reach - the network stack, the location service, application attestation, and cryptographic primitives. Three transport underlays share one interface. Over PAN and LAN, an agent advertises a rotating recognition token derived from its key and time slot, so a peer who knows the key recognises it before contact and nobody else can track it; whether it answers unrecognised contacts is a per-underlay trust level set by GLP. Over…