Pike Technical Protocol & Architecture Documentation

Deep dive into Pike's peer-to-peer streaming architecture, hybrid post-quantum cryptography, signaling primitives, and terminal CLI implementations.

Architecture Overview

We engineered Pike to deliver maximum P2P transfer throughput and absolute privacy across heterogenous devices (Web browsers, terminal CLI tools, servers, and scripts). Unlike traditional file sharing services that route encrypted blobs through cloud relay servers, Pike establishes direct WebRTC DataChannels using STUN candidate discovery.

Hybrid Post-Quantum Cryptography

To protect against future "Harvest Now, Decrypt Later" quantum threats, we implemented a dual-layer hybrid key exchange model combining classical elliptic curve cryptography with NIST Post-Quantum standards:

X25519 ECDH

Classical Curve25519 Diffie-Hellman key exchange providing 128-bit security against classical attacks.

ML-KEM-768 (Kyber)

NIST FIPS 203 standardized Module-Lattice-Based Key Encapsulation Mechanism providing quantum-resistant encryption.

BLAKE3 KDF

High-speed cryptographic key derivation combining shared secrets into a symmetric 256-bit session key.

ChaCha20-Poly1305

Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data enforcing chunk-level confidentiality with 64-bit nonces.

P2P Streaming & DataChannel Protocol

File streaming operates over WebRTC DataChannels using our binary chunk framing protocol:

Chunk size fixed at 8192 bytes for optimal MTU alignment and browser memory footprint.
Window-based backpressure flow control preventing memory bloat during multi-gigabyte transfers.
Stream integrity validated end-to-end via Merkle root validation upon completion.

CLI Installation Commands

Pike CLI is available on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Run the command for your platform:

Cargo (Rust Toolchain)

cargo install pike

macOS & Linux (Shell)

curl -fsSL https://pike.sh/install.sh | sh

Windows (PowerShell)

iwr -useb https://pike.sh/install.ps1 | iex