Re: [freenet-devl] What replaces inform.php in 0.4 (if anything)?

[Adam Langley]

I wonder if the announcment protocol couldn't be made to work off
multiple node addresses.

(Oskar please don't kill me for this) At the moment the Alice contacts
her one known node Bob and Bob forwards the announcement, forming a
chain. The messages pass up and down this chain a number of times. If
Bob is Evil he can simulate the whole announcment and MITM Alice
forever.

If Alice could get more than 1 reference she could:

Order them into Nodes[n]
for i in Nodes:
    contact i and say "You are part of an announcement chain and X is
    before you and Y is after you"
Start the annoucement at Nodes[0]

The announcment gets forwarded along the chain Alice setup and if it
runs off the 'end' (a node Alice didn't give a next-in-chain noderef
to) the last node forwards randomly until HTL runs out (as it does
currently).

Only 1 node in the chain has to be good for the agreed keyspace to be
random and the one of the annoucement replies could be signed by all
the nodes in the chain who Alice setup - thus she can check that all
the nodes she setup took part.

We could then be less strict about the init noderef because it's not
so dependant on 1 node (assuming Alice gets a good spread of initrefs
from web sites, IRC, whatever). 

AGL

-- 
Whenever anyone says, "theoretically," they really mean, "not really."

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