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+Welcome to the Vanadium github repositories! Vanadium is an open source framework created by engineers at Google that is intended to make it much easier to develop secure, distributed applications that can run anywhere and everywhere. It provides:
+
++ a complete security model, based on public-key cryptography, that supports fine
+grained permissioning and delegation. The combination of traditional ACLs and "blessings with cavaets" supports a broad set of practical requirements.
++ symmetrically authenticated and encrypted RPC. The RPC model is bi-directional, supports streaming and can be run through proxies. The result is a secure communications framework that can be used for large scale data-centre applications as well as for enterprise or consumer applications that need to navigate NAT boundaries.
++ a self-describing encoding format that is both performant and designed to support a broad range of programming language semantics (today we have support for go, java and javascript).
++ a global federated naming service that offers the convenience of urls but allows for federation and multilevel resolution. The 'programming model' consists of nothing more than invoking methods on names, subject to security constraints.
++ 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 the others mentioned would work just as well.
++ a storage service, Syncbase, that can be run on all devices, small or large, and offers synchronized peer-to-peer storage. Syncbase offers:
+	 - a structured store that can be queried using a sql-like language,
+	 - a blob store that synchronized content across all multiple devices,
+	 - the ability to group data into 'synchronization groups' to control which
+	 devices are synchronized,
+	 - fine grained access control,
+	 - peer-to-peer synchronization and conflict resolution,
+	 - offline operation is inherently supported.
+
+We believe that the APIs should be well designed and stable and have taken pains to separate our APIs ([v.io/v23]) from all of our code that implements them. We provide a backwards compatibility guarantee for the APIs and have carried out usability testing on the APIs themselves.
+
+[v.io/v23]: https://godoc.org/v.io/v23/
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