What happends when I start my Maidsafeclient?

Trying to learn more about how the Maidsafesystem works.
In this topic I’ll us a bottom-up approach and try to figure out what happends
when I start the client (node) and log on to the network. Hope some experts here can help me
out getting the right picture of how things do work. I leave the SAFEcoins and vaults out for now.

What I’ve learned so far:

What I’ve learned so far:

  • A client will have about 4 to 8 ip-connections to the network.
  • everything is encrypted using different layers of encryption.
  • All data is saved as chuncks, with a minimum of 3 parts, and a maxsize of 3 MB per part.
  • the network is XOR-based and most communication is done with the 4 closest (based on XOR) nodes.
  • as a client I connect to a hop. All communication goes through hops.
  • my personal data is stored in a Data-atlas which contains Datamaps with the info about my file(s)
  • the files will only be reconstructed when I open them, otherwise they just look like files in a map and won’t
    be loaded.
  1. I connect (for this example) to 6 Hops on the network. This means 6 ip-connections.
  2. My client will create key-pairs so all connections can be encrypted.
  3. The Hops will give me their puclic keys, and I’ll provide my public keys to them so the ip-connections
    from and to the hops will be encrypted. This is the first encryption layer.
  4. Each hop will connect me to 16 other nodes by supplying me with their public-keys, and provide them mine.
  5. When I connect to the 16 nodes, there’s a double layer of encryption. the first between me and a hop,
    the second one between me and the other nodes. The hops cannot see the communications between me and the nodes due to the second layer of encryption.
  6. I’m still not “logged on” to the network so I request the chuncks of data with containing my data-atlas.
    This atlas is encrypted using obfuscation (hashes of different chuncks etc) and AES and needs my username, pin
    and password to be encrypted.
  7. The hops and 4 closest nodes in the network provide me with the chuncks (probably 3) so I can enter my login pin, pass etc. These will never leave my computer so nobody but me will know them and be able to decrypt the data-atlas containing my datamaps.

I wonder if I’m close to how the system really works. Please let me know if I missed something.

1 Like

Could you please tell me where the link is to download the maidsafe client? Thankyou

As far as I know there isn’t. If you’re a programmer or do know something about compiling software, you could set up you’re own local testnet. If you’re a users interested in Maidsafe (just like me) you’ll have to wait for a beta- or final release. Somewhere Q4.

1 Like

There will be something easy to test out;