Matthew Toseland: > So splitfiles and freesites are not anonymous... and what are we left > with? Mixmastered first two hops will reduce the information available > to the attacker significantly... but it is not certain whether that will > go in before 1.0 (I think it should, but oskar thinks it shouldn't, and > ian will probably side with oskar, so it probably won't).
In general, it is obvious that as a user initiates more requests, attackers observing the network will learn more about them. However, what is not quite so obvious is that if many requests are initiated in a short interval, attackers gain two substantial advantages, especially when the values of the pending keys may be guessed. The network will be more static, making data much easier to interpret, and attackers will be able to work in real time to track down the source, for instance, by selecting nodes to monitor, or even by using active attacks like flooding certain nodes. This is a deep problem that will not bear a quick dismissal or some argument about the precise length of a "short interval." Certain behaviors erode anonymity. If the erosion is too severe, the behavior must be avoided. Anyway, I agree with Oskar about deferring the addition of new features until the core routing has been proven in practice. I can't imagine Freenet gradually evolving towards a different routing algorithm. The logic demands that we either refine the algorithm we have or design a new one. _______________________________________________ devl mailing list devl at freenetproject.org http://hawk.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl
