What are Secure Channels

Overview #

Before two peers can transmit data, the communication channel they establish needs to be secured. By design, libp2p supports many different transports (TCP, QUIC, WebSocket, WebTransport, etc.). Some transports have built-in encryption at the transport layer like QUIC, while other transports (e.g. TCP, WebSocket) lack native security and require a security handshake after the transport connection has been established.

Secure channels in libp2p #

libp2p specifies two security protocols, TLS 1.3 and Noise. After the handshake has finished, we need to negotiate a stream multiplexer for the connection.