OpenBalkans

Internet Balkanization Appliance Creation Kit

Overview

Internet Balkanization Appliance (IBA) is an implementation of the OpenBalkans protocol, which can manifest as a website, a standalone application, or an actual physical appliance (although there are no known instances of this yet).

From the user's perspective, an IBA is a collection of weblogs. A weblog is a series of posts. Conceptually this is similar to Mastodon, but decentralized (as opposed to federated).

This document describes the OpenBalkans protocol (OpenBP) version 0.

API documentation

Posts

Container: JSON Web Token (JWT)

Signing: ECDSA using P-256 curve, and SHA-256 (ES256)

• NIST P-256 ≡ ANSI prime256v1 ≡ SEC 2 secp256r1
  • This is not confusing at all
• Requires RFC 6979
• Upgrade path: see SafeCurves

Key derivation function (KDF): WarpWallet

ASCII Armor

• Post key: Base58
• Other binary data: RFC 4648 base64url with no padding

Post types

Post types are a strict superset of RFC 2046 Media Types.

Data structure

| Name | Type | Required | Comment | --- | --- | --- | --- | openbp | int | Yes | OpenBalkans protocol version, 0 | pk | string | Yes | Post key | docs | list | Yes | One or more hyperlinks to contents | size | int | Yes | Size of contents, bytes | type | string | Yes | Content-Type, Media Type(contents) | chk | string | Yes | Checksum, SHA-256(contents), base64url encoded | rel | set | No | Relational tags | other | object | No | Reply to other post | other.pk | string | Yes | Other post key (In-Reply-To) | other.chk | string | Yes | Checksum, SHA-256(other post's JWT), base64url encoded

Post key

Post key is a concatenation of the following fields:

• Base58(ObjectId)
• U+002E FULL STOP
• Base58(public key)

We use Satoshi's variant of Base58.

Post keys are considered to be globally unique. Any collisions should be treated as a flood attack.

Hyperlinks

Links in the docs field can be the following:

• HTTP(S) URL
• RFC 2397 Data URL
• RFC 6901 JSON Pointer

  "": "jsonpointer",
  "url": "https://httpbin.org/headers",
  "pointer": "/headers/User-Agent"

Relational tags

| Rel | Type | Comment | --- | --- | --- | collection | application/json | Collection of posts | self | application/ld+json | User profile | self, userpic | image/jpeg, image/png | User profile picture | upd_pk | application/octet-stream | Updated public key

User Profiles

Posts with 'self' in the rel field are associated with the user account, and aren't a part of any content feed.

A user profile is a JSON-LD post of @type Person.