How far can we go in abusing the production network in order to make it work? The testnet is never likely to be large enough to be a useful model. What I propose is that on swap requests, which already include the location of the node, and the locations of its peers, we also add a unique ID (say the first 8 bytes of some hash of the identity) for the node and each peer.
This would make it easier to map the network. It is already possible to map the network but it is a lot of work and a lot of uncertainty, because we don't know about every swap so we have to try to do partial matches. This may make some attacks easier. Having said that, with the current swap requests, you can probably identify the topology close to you with some confidence. The main benefit here is in identifying the topology further away more reliably. Which isn't that interesting for attackers unless they've been e.g. watching #freenet-refs and can match an IP address to each node on the network. Even then, there are much easier attacks, and correlation attacks on nodes 4 hops away may not have enough information. The benefit is we could test all our pet theories about the shape of the network being completely broken due to #freenet-refs . We could gather real world information about node uptimes, location swapping, location clustering. It would of course be spoofable, but only to the extent that location swapping is already spoofable. It would double the size of the swap request packets, but these are fairly small. What do you think? -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/attachments/20070323/fd0d7abb/attachment.pgp>
