Note: I'm been lurking on freenet-dev for a while, but this is my first post to freenet-dev.
One problem with Freenet is the threat of attackers intentionally causing fake documents which have keys intersecting with those of real documents on other nodes or the names of potential user keys. A solution to this problem would be to totally throw away the restriction that two different documents can't share the same exact key. This would require two-tiered keys, with a user level key has and a document hash. Document hashes would be unique (for obvious reasons), but multiple documents could share the same user level key (that is, a key meant for human use). Because Freenet may very well be used with hypertext documents, a document should be able to link to both user level keys and document hash keys. This feature would require new messages to be added to the Freenet protocal to query information about user level keys (that is, to get a list of document hash keys). It would also be good to have messages to query information about actual documents (using their document hash keys), such as the documents size, author, MIME type, etc. Of course, this would add the weakness of an attacker adding new documents for a pre-existing key, so a user should be able to cancel a download in mid-download without killing their Freenet connection. This would be useful if Freenet was used with a program such as a web browser which would allow a user to view a document while it downloads. This feature would also make it easy to implement versioning, by having a document attribute (in addition to MIME type, author, size) for version. A Freenet client could be configured to use the real document with the latest version number. Creating a new version would not remove previous versions of a document, so this could not be used to delete other documents. -- Travis Bemann _______________________________________________ Freenet-dev mailing list Freenet-dev at lists.sourceforge.net http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/freenet-dev
