Overview

Kenosis is:

• a fully-distributed p2p RPC system built on top of XMLRPC.
• zero-defect software.
• highly compatible.

Download and sourceforge project page.

News

• 2005-01-14: The dns bridge and bootstrap node are unstable. If you try kenosis and find that it does not work, this is the most likely reason. We are working on new hosting, which we think will help.

What Kenosis provides

Kenosis nodes form a Kademlia-style network with the following properties:

• Nodes are identified by 160-bit addresses.
• Nodes can find other nodes given an address and can find the set of nodes with addresses nearest to a given address.
• Nodes can route RPC requests efficiently to any online node.

Kenosis is zero-defect software

Too many peer-to-peer programs and libraries have initially seemed to work but floundered under increasing complexity. One of our goals for kenosis was to make reliable software that would Just Work.

• Every line of Kenosis has been subjected to extensive unit testing and simulation testing.
• Kenosis is designed from the ground up for simplicity, stability, and scalability.

Kenosis does one thing and does it well. It is our hope that others will use Kenosis as a foundation for new and exciting peer-to-peer applications.

Compatibility

Kenosis must work on a wide range of platforms because we want it to provide a solid basis for many p2p applications.

• Kenosis is written in pure python
• Kenosis has been tested on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
• Kenosis works in almost any networking environnment, including restrictive corporate firewalls, because it uses XMLRPC for its network communications. It can also work with an HTTP proxy.

BitTorrent

As a demonstration of Kenosis we a modified version of BitTorrent that uses Kenosis to find the tracker for a torrent file.

The source code for this is in the regular download. More details can be found in the Kenosis-BitTorrent readme.

Future Directions

Version 1.0 of Kenosis:

• aims to provide a simple distributed XMLRPC primitive suitable for creating reliable and scalable peer-to-peer applications.
• does not address anonymity, privacy or distributed data-retention.

We hope to address these and other issues in the future. For example:

• Anonymity could be provided by proxying requests through intermediate nodes, so that neither the originator nor the provider of the results for any request can be determined. Although Kenosis currently works via simple HTTP, future versions may use SSL for link-based encryption and public-key encryption for end-to-end verification of the authenticity of requests and node metadata.
• Using the ideas described in the original Kademlia paper, Kenosis could be easily extended to provide distributed hashtable semantics, providing distributed data-retention services.

More information can be found on our sourceforge project page. If you're interested in opportunities to get involved with the development of Kenosis, please join the kenosis-discuss mailing list.

Getting started with Kenosis

If you are interested in trying Kenosis out for yourself, try this simple experiment:

>>> import kenosis
>>> n = kenosis.Node(bootstrapNetAddress=None)
>>> n.port()
5005
>>> n2 = kenosis.Node(bootstrapNetAddress=None)
>>> n2.bootstrap("localhost:%s" % n.port())
>>> n2.port()
5006
>>> n2.rpc(nodeAddress=n.nodeAddress()).kenosis.ping()
address.NodeAddress(numericAddress=0x11fe53239e10f6c7b21d9a9aaf37a2f37cc34abe)
>>> class Handler:
...     def returnInt(self, arg):
...         return int(arg)
...
>>> n.registerNamedHandler(name="test", handler=Handler())
>>> n2.rpc(nodeAddress=n.nodeAddress()).test.returnInt(42)
42
>>> n2.rpc(nodeAddress=n.nodeAddress()).test.returnInt(1234321)
1234321
>>> n.rpc(nodeAddress=n2.nodeAddress()).kenosis.ping()
address.NodeAddress(numericAddress=0x8b6eb0433be6a2751493ef39ac5a7236182e20b3)

For more examples of usage look at kenosis/test.py