This project is a follow-on to my undergraduate dissertation, https://github.com/Threadnaught/Nihilo-ESP32. While Nihilo-ESP32 "worked", it was always intended to be a prototype, of limited use in production.
This project is also currently a prototype, but a bit less so than the pure ESP32 version.
Nihilo is built on three pillars:
- Sandboxing/Portability with WebAssembly
- Communication with Remote Procedure Calls
- Security with Elliptic Curve Cryptography
Glad to hear it! Install cURL and docker and type this into a linux terminal.
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Threadnaught/Nihilo/master/scripts/NihDock.sh | bash
This will take ~20 minutes to complete. Once it does, you will have a directory called Nih. In order to run an example, you can type this:
cd Nih
./enter.sh
You are now in a docker container set up to run Nihilo. You can run a hello world program like this:
cd /nih/
./bin/nih -m machine_prototypes/hello_world/hello_world.json -e
This should print "Hello World" to the console. The 32-byte hex string you see is the public key for the machine specified in hello_world.json. Public keys are used as IDs in Nihilo. Machines communicate inside of and between hosts using their public keys, so every machine-level communication is designed to be only encrypted or decrypted by the sender or receiver.