[freenet-support] 0.7 public alpha imminent!

2008-01-22 Thread Malkus Lindroos
One issue that might need consideration is the extensibility of the 
network when a public alpha version is released.

Currently, each node has a hard-coded limit of 20 opennet connections. 
These slots are, at least on my nodes, all filled up on nodes connected 
to the network. Now if this is also the situation with the seednodes, 
how do newcomers integrate into the network? Or will newcomers form a 
new, disconnected outer layer? This would especially be an issue after a 
slashdot.

IMO there would be need for hub -nodes, that are well connected to the 
network, and which have a flexible amount of connections. The nodes 
would cut off nodes based on some algorithm based on the usefulness of a 
link (data transferred, success rate, etc.). However, the nodes would 
always allow new connections, and only after some time enter the new 
connections into the competition of the necessity of the link.

The darkent/opennet structure could have fullfilled this need, with the 
darknet building persistent connections that form the core network, and 
an opennet for newcomers to find more permanent links. However, there is 
currently no mechanism of moving opennet connections to darknet, or make 
them otherwise (semi-)permanent, or is there?

--
Malkus Lindroos

Matthew Toseland wrote:
> Hopefully we will release a second public alpha of Freenet 0.7 next week. 
> Please test Freenet, and reply to this thread with any bugs that you think 
> need to be fixed urgently.
>   
> 
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Re: [freenet-support] [Tech] Some issues and considerations

2008-01-22 Thread Michael Rogers
Hi Stephen,

 In the UK, a new law has been brought in which would make 
 it a crime for a suspect who has encrypted data on his computer to fail 
 to reveal the password to the police.

The police can only issue a disclosure order if they believe on reasonable 
grounds... that a key to the protected information is on the possession of 
the person in question. I'm not a lawyer but that suggests a defence on the 
basis that you don't have, and have never had, the key in question.

http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2000/ukpga_2023_en_8#pt3-pb1-l1g49

 And in the USA, users with encrypted content are 
 curently protected by a constitutional right to privacy which prevents 
 police from compelling them to disclose their passwords. But right now 
 even that right is being put into question with an important test case 
 taking place (see link below)...

The test case relates to users who know a password but refuse to disclose 
it; it does not relate to users who don't know a decryption key (which 
would be too long for most people to memorise anyway).
 
 It is also important to point 
 out that at least in the USA the NSA avails itself to the use of advanced 
 programs that can carry out advanced 'dictionary analysis' to permute 
 nearly every possible combination of letters and numbers for a 'brute 
 force' attack to discover the password for an encrypted file - a process 
 that can take years.

Again, this is not strictly relevant - a password can be cracked using 
brute force, but a 256-bit encryption key can't.

 Secondly, there 
 are government installations in the UK (for instance a new MI6 building 
 on the London enbankment, which has the national internet traffic 
 channeled through it) which carry out surveillance of communications 
 including internet communications. This surveillance includes not just 
 keyword profiling but also several other different kinds of intelligent 
 and statistical analysis of the traffic itself, even where encrypted 
 files are involved, and an significant intelligence perspective can be 
 obtained in this way.

Yes, traffic analysis is a very important issue. Freenet does its best to 
frustrate traffic analysis by using a transport protocol with no 
unencrypted header fields, delaying and coalescing small packets to 
disguise timing patterns, and padding packets to disguise the size of the 
payload. Nevertheless I'm sure it's possible to design a rule for a deep 
packet inspection engine that will identify Freenet traffic.

A possible direction for future research would be hiding Freenet traffic 
inside other application-layer protocols (HTTP, BitTorrent, RTP etc).

Cheers,
Michael
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