Announcement: AltSendme is now DashBeam. Same app, easier to pronounce, remember and find
It's like scp without needing to know the IP address. Add some files to DashBeam, and it will give you a pastable ticket that you can give to anyone who needs your files. DashBeam will connect your devices directly & transfer the data without any accounts or configuration.
Content-addressed blob storage and transfer. iroh-blobs implements request/response and streaming transfers of arbitrary-sized byte blobs, using BLAKE3-verified streams and content-addressed links.
Tickets are a way to share dialing information between iroh endpoints. They're a single token that contains everything needed to connect to another endpoint, or to fetch a blob in this case. Contains Ed25519 NodeIds: Your device's cryptographic identity for authentication. They're also very powerful. It's worth pointing out this setup is considerably better than full peer-2-peer systems, which broadcast your IP to peers. Instead in iroh, tickets are used to form a "cozy network" between peers you explicitly want to connect with. It's possible to go "full p2p" & configure your app to broadcast dialing details, but tickets represent a better middle-ground default.
Peers register with an open-source public relay servers at startup to help traverse firewalls and NATs, enabling connection setup. Once connected, iroh uses QUIC hole punching to try and establish a direct peer-to-peer connection, bypassing the relay. If direct connection is possible, communication happens directly between peers with end-to-end encryption; otherwise, the relay operates only temporarily as a fallback. This enables smooth reliable connections between peers within local-network and across the internet.
QUIC is a modern transport protocol built on UDP, designed to reduce latency and improve web performance over TCP. Developed originally by Google and now standardized by the IETF as HTTP/3's foundation, it integrates TLS 1.3 encryption directly into the protocol.
QUIC allows following super-powers:
DashBeam uses open-source public relay servers to support establishing direct connections, to speed up initial connection times, and to provide a fallback should direct connections between two endpoints fail or be impossible otherwise. All connections are end-to-end encrypted. The relay is "just another UDP socket" for sending encrypted packets around. Read more.
