Yes, you will get secure direct connections. This matters for privacy in case of an encrypted chat, but also has a lot of benefits for more demanding use cases such as video streaming.

Here is a video of frando from our team demoing media over QUIC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3qqyu1mmGQ

If you use the default setup you are still depending on a tiny bit of cloud infrastructure such as our public relays to faciliate the hole punching. However, we also have optional local discovery using e.g. mDNS.

You'll get a direct connection in most cases, but sometimes it will need to fall back to relays. n0 provides free relays, but ultimately that can get rather expensive. You can also run your own relays for your app.

Yes, I wrote the current tor transport as a quick demo/testground for custom transports.

Arguably directly embedding the rust tor implementation would be more useful for the typical iroh user that wants an embeddable library. I just did not get to it yet.

But thanks for the link.

If you run a public unauthenticated relay you act as a home relay for whoever has your relay configured in their relay map and is close in terms of latency.

So you might get a lot of traffic. You can configure rate limiting, as we do on our public relays.

The traffic is fully encrypted and can not be decrypted by the relay. The only information the relay has is what is necessary for it to function - the endpoint id and ip addresses of the endpoints that are connected to it at any given time, as well as endpoint pairings.

You relay encrypted traffic with no egress to the open internet. So if you want to compare it with Tor, it would be like a tor guard/middle relay, not an exit node.

All the data is e2e encrypted and nothing is stored. The usual self hosting public things rules apply.

We bumped to 1.0 an hour ago https://pypi.org/project/iroh/#history

No. The data in each direction is encrypted by TLS, using ephemeral keys.

Only the owner of the corresponding private key can initiate a connection from their public key, or receive a connection attempt to their public key.

Let's say you have alice and bob talking via a relay. Even if you have the private key of alice, you can impersonate alice to bob, but not vice versa. So you can't initiate a connection between the two.

To really intercept data you would need the private keys of both participants.

There are already some crates providing a bridge between LoRa using iroh. See for example https://crates.io/crates/donglora-bridge

I am not aware of a LoRa custom transport yet, but that is not unexpected given that the custom transport API is relatively new, and our main focus has been on getting iroh 1.0 out of the door.