Vanadium

Welcome to the Vanadium GitHub repositories!

Vanadium is an open-source framework created by engineers at Google that makes it much easier to develop secure, distributed applications that can run anywhere. It provides:

• a complete security model, based on public-key cryptography, that supports fine-grained permissions and delegation. The combination of traditional ACLs and “blessings with caveats” supports a broad set of practical requirements.
• symmetrically authenticated and encrypted RPC, with support for bi-directional messaging, streaming and proxying, that works on a variety of network protocols, including TCP and Bluetooth. The result is a secure communications infrastructure that can be used for large-scale datacenter applications as well as for smaller-scale enterprise and consumer applications, including those needing to cross NAT boundaries.
• a performant, self-describing encoding format, usable from many programming languages and platforms (including Go, Java/Android, and JavaScript, with more on the way).
• a global naming service that offers the convenience of urls but allows for federation and multi-level resolution. The ‘programming model’ consists of nothing more than invoking methods on names, subject to security checks.
• a discovery API for advertising and scanning for services over a variety of protocols, including BLE and mDNS (Bonjour).
• the ability to use multiple global and/or local identity providers (e.g. Google, Facebook, Microsoft Exchange, PAM, etc.). We currently provide an OAuth2-based implementation, but others would work just as well.
• a storage service, Syncbase, that can be run on all devices, large or small, and offers synchronized peer-to-peer storage. Syncbase offers:
  • a structured store that can be queried using a SQL-like query language
  • a blob store that synchronizes content across all devices
  • the ability to group data into ‘synchronization groups’ to control what's synced with who
  • fine-grained access control
  • peer-to-peer synchronization with configurable conflict resolution
  • offline operation

The Vanadium APIs are relatively stable and have been subjected to extensive usability testing. In addition, we've taken care to cleanly separate the APIs (v.io/v23) from their implementations.