The Open Peer Protocol has several design considerations to address the realities of the Internet infrastructure while delivering the functionality required:
- Must allow any peer to connect to any other peer (if authorized).
- Must understand firewall principles and to offer an architecture which factors that firewalls are prevalent and within the natural scope of the architecture’s basic design.
- Must accept that it’s not always desirable to have peer machines automatically promoted to rendezvous servers.
- Must allow additional services to be layered onto of the architecture
- Must enable peers to find each other using directory services.
- Must enable secure peer-to-peer communication without penetration or monitoring by third parties.
- Must allow peers to perform identity validations.
- Must allow anonymous peers, i.e. similar to unlisted and non-guessable phone numbers.
- Must allow for differing server rendezvous architectures, i.e. anywhere from peer-to-peer self-organized models to centralized network layouts are to be abstracted from the protocol.
- Must not require end user signed certificates from a known authority chain for each peers on the network to establish secure communications.
- Must not require end users or administrators to configure firewalls or open ports under normal circumstances.
