cor - comparison to other protocols
IP based routing
The IP protocol as used by most mesh networks today was build with the assumption that people building networks are cooperative. There are lots of ways the operator of a single router can cause malfunction on major parts of the network. High load can easily cause major malfunction without any deliberate attack at all. Solving these issues on top of IP is hard or impossible. Many bigger networks try to solve them by setting up some kind of organisation which does central administration. However none of the problems are really solved this way and new social ones are created. The organisation can be unfair and can be instrumented for bad purposes. It also makes everything more burocratic.
Gnunet
Both Gnunet and cor are mesh networks with freedom in mind. The differences are:
- Gnunet is an application framework stretching from freedom overlay to general purpose networking. Cor is a general purpose network stretching towards freedom.
- Gnunet operates only in userspace. This allows them to be run on every operating system. But it also means that all packets have to be passed to userspace, possibly decreasing performance. Hovever, Gnunet does not look very high-performance to me to begin with.
- Gnunet stores and caches some data locally. Cor does not do this.
Tor
Tor is an overlay network. Every node must be able to reach every other node as routing is completely random. Cor is a layer 3+4 protocol which provides connectivity to nodes which do not have a direct connection. Also, it does not provide the same level of privacy.