On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 9:32 AM, Matthew Toseland <toad at amphibian.dyndns.org > wrote:
> Since Eleriseth announced he was leaving and we should focus on > speed/usability, then opennet security, and only then darknet, I have been > looking into options for securing opennet, and discussing this with various > people. > I agree that speed/usability should be the top priority (although obviously not the only priority). Most of the proposals below are directly contrary to usability - we need to encourage people to contribute to the Freenet network, not punish them for it, nor make them jump through unnecessary hoops. We need to find solutions that won't make it even more difficult to contribute to the Freenet network. The main attacks here are: > - MAST: Listen for a predictable request/insert, triangulate roughly where > the originator is on the network based on the requests you receive, > announce to that location, repeat until you have the target. Cheap. Really, > really cheap. > To the extent that this is feasible, routing a request randomly on its initial hop, perhaps with a bias towards nodes that are further from your node's location, should make this considerably more difficult. > - Surveillance: Connect to every node, log all the inserts for a month > (freenet content doesn't last long if not requested). Connect it to > announced content. Surprisingly cheap, given our relatively low bandwidth > usage per peer etc, and it will become cheaper per node as the network > grows because bandwidth (and everything else) gets *really* cheap in large > volumes. This is a Sybil attack: The only way to beat it is by using some > sort of scarcity. > We could have nodes detect this kind of behavior since it would be somewhat weird - a bunch of inserts coming from the same node, etc. Essentially a heuristic "bad behavior" detector that cases nodes to be blocked. Ian. -- Ian Clarke Personal blog: http://blog.locut.us/
