Yggdrasil is an experimental compact routing scheme that is fully decentralised and only requires a small amount of state to work. It is predominanently a shortest-path scheme, whereby the network will attempt to find the most direct path to the destination.
Nodes are equal participants and connect to each other using peering connections which carry network traffic. Peerings can be set up over any IP network — whether that’s a direct wired or wireless link, a local area network or even the Internet. In some cases, peerings can also be set up automatically by nearby devices on the same network using multicast discovery.
All nodes on an Yggdrasil network are routers and will automatically pass traffic to help it get closer to its destination where possible. This means that, even in a network that is only sparsely connected, all nodes will be reachable by all other nodes on that network. It doesn’t even matter if a node is behind a NAT — once a peering is established, traffic flows in both directions over that peering.
Yggdrasil is also designed to tolerate changes in the network. For example, if a link fails, the network will self-heal and use other links to route traffic where available. This makes it suitable for use in mesh networks, where the network topolopy can and often will change.
Each node on the network has a location-independent cryptographic identity and, in our current experimental implementation, stable IPv6 addresses are generated from this key. This allows IPv6-supporting applications to work over Yggdrasil largely without modification. The address is fully mobile and stays with the node as it moves arou
12 Comments
gnabgib
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orbisvicis
Is firewalling the yggdrasil adapter susceptible to IP spoofing?
gerdesj
Some of us are old enough to remember a Linux distro called Yggdrasil. It was my first but certainly not my last.
Does this thing involve a MAC address?
kachapopopow
Why do I remember minecraft using yggdrasil at some point. Maybe just a name clash of a java library.
api
The challenge with these schemes is always making them robust against intentional attacks.
It’s hard enough to do that for centrally regulated systems. There are whole giant companies like Cloudflare that mostly exist to do that.
With a fully decentralized mesh if someone finds a working attack there is no good way to coordinate a response.
Small hobby and research nets can get away with that, but if anything like this ever got popular or even close to mainstream it would be destroyed. This is especially true if there were any way to make money by ruining it.
bawolff
Is there a paper somewhere explaining their system in detail?
easygenes
If this is interesting to you, there's also a new edge mesh protocol which would dovetail into it well called MeshCore. MeshCore is LoRa and MCU focused, works at L2. Ygg is L3 and could run at e.g. your LoRa SBC gateway to provide seamless global distribution of edge mesh chats and sensor relays.
https://github.com/ripplebiz/MeshCore
https://youtu.be/fNWf0Mh2fJw
https://chatgpt.com/share/681c281f-0a24-8011-8ec9-6d58ce3db0…
cyberax
Interesting. There's a fundamental vulnerability in mesh routing: you either have to control addressing, or a malicious actor can flood the network topology with bogus data.
Just imagine somebody generating 10000000000 addresses and flooding everybody with that information.
It looks like Yggdrasil doesn't address (ha) this vulnerability? It kinda side-steps it by requiring enrollment through an already trusted node?
getcrunk
Mesh/decentralized networks seem poised to finally take off and become widespread. Unfortunately I don’t think it will be in the form of a cyber utopia free of control but a tool of power and surveillance, networking ai powered robots (swarm based weapons) and other smart things
pharos92
Shortest path is fundamentally problematic in networks. The shortest path isn't always the best path.
The shortest path might be a 1Mbps link with high latency. The 'best' path might be several 100Mbps links with low latency chain together.
Calliope1
Yggdrasil: A decentralized, self-healing, cryptographically addressed network of the future?
It’s redefining what “being connected” means — no ISPs, no central config, fully peer-organized routing, and resilient to constant topology shifts.
The real question:
If Yggdrasil can scale to real-world mesh networks, do we still need the traditional internet backbone?
Or… could it become the true foundation for edge computing?
dhaavi
I was intrigued by Yggdrasil, so much that I built a similar network, also using concepts of other networks in that realm.
It uses a logical world map for improved address space allocation and routing as well as source routing. Private non-routable addresses for better privacy are planned.
https://mycoria.org
It will see more development over the next years, as I will be using it in an upcoming project.
Happy to answer any questions you have here.