Ai-Fi Architecture

In this page we will describe those architectural components that the Ai-Fi infrastructure is based on. Their implementation and deliveries are to follow a phased plan, which will be further detailed out in our Roadmap.

In a nutshell, Ai-Fi is your best friend in commanding and controlling your various devices, either locally or remotely, through the most private and secured Ai-Fi infrastructure. All access are carried out through the client app, the "Ai-Fi Central", which runs on your mobile phones with a inbuilt crypto Ai-Fi Wallet for managing your many DiDs (Decentralized Identifiers).

Under Ai-Fi, access to remote resources such as your smart devices at home is protected and conducted within the confinement of a private "Domain", which is to be gated by an "Home Server" that functions as a firewall. For private and secured access to remote gated resources, the Ai-Fi Service Cloud provides the most transparent, non-tracking, and warrant-proof connectivity. To remove the possible interference by Ai-Fi.net and other hacking attempts, this infrastructure further adopts the blockchain technologies to provide the necessary transparency to counter-balance any men in the middle. All encryption keys are negotiated end-to-end directly between Ai-Fi Centrals or between an Ai-Fi Central to Home Servers. Ai-Fi in the middle has no visibility into the traffic and is incapable of collecting metadata between the corresponding parties.

Ai-Fi Central is an app which is to run on your mobile phone. The installation is fairly straightforward: select the appropriate package for your platform, download from the App Store, and run with it. With Ai-Fi Central alone you can have fun already in taking secure notes, keeping track of your passwords, and sending/receiving secure emails. For extending the fun to your other network assets, including the saving of your encrypted emails, backing up your photos from your mobile phone, remotely control your smart devices at home, and distributing multiple copies of your files to many remote devices or sites, you need to first fence in those remote devices in one or multiple Ai-Fi Domains in order to protect them from encroachment by bad elements roaming around the Internet. Each of those domains must be gated by an Ai-Fi Home Server as previously mentioned.

Setting up the Home Server is a bit more involved. The most straightforward approach is to acquire a ready-made server box directly from our Amazon store with software pre-installed. For those technically endowed, you don't need to buy from Amazon. You just need to install the Ai-Fi Home Server software on a Linux server box, or install the software to a Docker container. The Raspberry Pi 4 is a popular choice among some of our users. We are a totally open-sourced operation and you can download or even build your own Ai-Fi Home server from our Github site. Once the server software is appropriately installed on a Linux server or container, you are good to go by following the deployment instructions. With the advent of IoT and the desire to protect your privacy and personal data, as a citizen of the Internet, you do need to have the readiness or willingness to learn about how to protect yourself from hackers and bad actors under the current surveillance capitalism. We can only prepare you so much with our infrastructure. However, worry you not: we have made the installation of your Home Server as easy as that for any of your IoT gadgets.

As of V. 2.0, the installation package is only available for Raspberry Pi 4.

Application Transparency

Ai-Fi.net offers a complete IPv4 address space for your private network or Intranet, which liberates your LAN-challenged applications from their parochial confinement. Gone is the dependency on the cloud for Intranet connectivity and its unintended implication on your privacy.

For conventional applications, which usually require addressability among their components and are therefore typically restricted to a confined LAN, Ai-Fi.net is able to extend their network coverage to all corners of the world via an Ai-Fi configuration of multiple branches.

Traditionally, to extend network applications beyond their immediate environment, some kind of public addressability is required. Nowadays this is usually done via the cloud, namely finding a centrally located cloud service with public IP addresses so all other devices may interconnect through this central cloud in a star configuration. Along the way one loses the physical possession of those critical servers consigned to a third-party cloud and the precious privacy afforded only by physically owning one's devices.

No Sign-up Procedure

First and foremost, Ai-Fi.net is a non-tracking shared resources for helping Ai-Fi users manage their private networks, or "Domains" as they are called, and protect their access to or from the public Internet. It is designed to maximize their privacy while allowing the construction of an exclusive range of networks for themselves, their families, and their communities. In its core an entirely new design principle of DiD (Decentralized Identifier) and Decentralized Pubic Key Infrastructure (DPKI) are followed. The singular characteristics of this DiD based identity management design conducted through a blockchain-based Ai-Fi Wallet is the large number of "identities" implemented per the involved application scenarios according to the "Privacy by Design" principle. Consequently, to participate in the Ai-Fi ecosystem there is no sign-up required. Authentication and authorization are conducted by the Ai-Fi users directly without needing any third-party proxies. However, this eradication of "free services" illusion implies that our users have to carry the cost of running the Ai-Fi infrastructure collectively (and anonymously), which is kept at a very reasonable rate.

Our members carry out their Ai-Fi operations pseudonymously based on the same account protection design as in Bitcoin. Their personal or community domains are segregated from each other but still allowing supervised inter-domain access and firewall protections.


Although Ai-Fi.net may be deployed in 5 steps or less, it is much more than a single App. Its function set is delivered through the following apps:

1. Ai-Fi Cloud Access: This is also known as the Wallet App. It creates your Ai-Fi wallet and the domain-wide CFG (configuration file) for your branches and other access control rules. It only runs on Apple or Android phones, with limited extensions to Windows and Apple Mac.
2. AP (Access Point) App: This is the App for controlling the ingress/egress of a branch. It may run on dedicated hardware like a Raspberry Pi based controller, or PCs running Microsoft Windows or Apple Macs.
3. RA (Remote Access) App: This allows domain members to access various private branches from the Internet.

These Apps are to be installed to various architectural elements in Ai-Fi.net according to their intended functions:

1. Ai-Fi AP (Access Point) Management: This administers how our members are referenced through various applications with them in exclusive control over their credentials.
2. Domain and Branch Configuration, Access, and Control: This is how your private networks are configured and managed through the AP (Access Point) App. The configuration is centrally administered in a multi-tenant SaaS fashion. The branches may be distributed across the Internet.
3. Internet Access Control: This is the support for incoming/outgoing traffic from/to the Internet. These external visits can be made either through the Ai-Fi HomeCloud App or directly as a public access with the Home Server as the firewall.

Pseudonymity

When first participating, an Ai-Fi user creates their own wallet in order to manage many different accounts utilized as identifiers under various application contexts. Once created, all Ai-Fi functions are carried out pseudonymously, identifiable only through their assigned crypto accounts in the wallet relative to their respective application context without being directly associated with any other of the owner's worldly identities such as their cell phones, email addresses, SSN, or credit cards. In other words, the Ai-Fi Wallet maintains a large number of crypto accounts to protect their self administered DiDs (Decentralized Identifiers), which are individually managed and applied per associated applications. Those DiDs are further managed through the Ai-Fi Digital Asset Framework.

The Wallet App safeguards your many account credentials and the domain-wide CFG (configuration file). The deployment of your domains is based on this CFG you've defined, after that you enable one by one individual Home Servers for various branches.

Account-less and Decentralized

There is no need to sign up for an account in order to participate in the Ai-Fi ecosystem. Instead, an Ai-Fi member is expected to create and own their individual Ai-Fi wallet on their mobile phones where it is physically/exclusively hosted and managed from. This is to eliminate any possibilities of tracking but still to be able to pay for various Ai-Fi security services. There is no free lunch, contrary to what those "free" services lead you to believe, but Ai-Fi charges very reasonably.

An Ai-Fi account is protected by two independent verification factors:

1. Your mobile phone where your Ai-Fi Wallet is created on
2. The Ai-Fi Central application PIN, also local to your phone

The Wallet App installed on your phones with its wallet and private CFG is depicted on the bottom right of the below diagram:

In addition to storing members' credentials in their personal phones, during the Ai-Fi operations for delivering Secure Email or other functions that may require email address or payment, the technology of AnonymousCloud is further adopted to enforce the Ai-Fi pseudonymity requirement so that our members are not traceable beyond their pseudonymous accounts. For details, please look into our blog on Security.

Domain Configuration

The goal of the Ai-Fi Domain is to allow all devices to be distributed over a wide area but still able to work together as if they were sharing an unrestricted LAN. A domain is further afforded a complete set of IPv4 addresses so it can be managed with ample flexibility in terms of address plan. Design your domain layout before installing any software.

Minimal Configuration
(Useful Test Scenario)

Download the Ai-Fi Central app onto your smart phone and create a private wallet through the app. Use the same app to define your only branch consisting of a single PC.

Next install the appropriate Home Server package software onto your Windows PC or Apple Mac so it can be remotely accessed by your smart phone. You may turn it into a public web server or other home servers even while you have no public IP addresses.

Multi-Branch Configuration

Install the Account App to your smart phone and define the domain database to include all branches to be deployed as in the Minimal Configuration. Move on individually to your PC, Mac or other Linux appliances such as Raspberry Pi to create Home Servers by installing the appropriate Home Server software, one for each of your branch, typically situated apart from other branches. All branches within the same domain may freely address each other as if they are all located in the same LAN.

For the upper right London Branch with all the IoT devices depicted, those "things" may spread out geographically, for which you need to follow the instruction for IoT deployment. If you have some highly mobile devices such as the robot on the left, it may be defined as a self-contained branch (with only a single device included) in order to allow for its high roaming requirement.

Integrated IoT Home Kits Bridges

The advances of IoT inject smart into things all around us, which will not fulfill their potentials unless they can be controlled from anywhere at anytime. This vision of keeping our things at our fingertips at all time is fully realizable through Ai-Fi.net. We have integrated Apple Homekit into Ai-Fi.net to demonstrate this capability. This is also an extension of Ai-Fi's Application Transparency explained previously.

Many incompatible homekits
Many different device to homekits protocols
pairing
Most remote control solutions involve the cloud, incurring wider attack surface and privacy concerns

Support for Hybrid Cloud

Migrating your IT assets into the cloud is an excellent option if your cloud services can be trusted. Ai-Fi.net will help extend your security perimeter to also cover your outsourced cloud elements.

Armed with the DiD stash and the self-administered crypto wallet we are now able to ramp up our private assets into the cloud anonymously. As long as the payments are met through your Ai-Fi Wallet, Ai-Fi.net accepts any requests for extending user assets into the Ai-Fi cloud without knowing anything about the requesting users. The possession of your cloud assets is completely anonymous.