On Wed, Dec 12, 2001 at 01:10:34PM +0100, Nico Galoppo wrote: <snip> > This implicits public-key encryption along the mixed path up until it > reaches the endpoint of the pre-routing phase, optionally requiring a > pki type key distribution. Have the performance implications of this > approach been studied before. One could think that it would severely > downgrade network performance, as assymmetric encryption of large blocks > of data takes alot of time. Is this kind of approach feasible in a > real-time application such as Freenet? i'm running a project (http://www.authnet.org/anonnet/) that implements a pipenet (a type of mix-net). crypto primitives these days are pretty fast. AES, for example, is much faster than DES. the bottle-neck w/ these types of things is latency, and for strong anonymity you have bandwidth concerns w/ regards to padding and the like.
<snip> > Local eavesdroppers and servers are unable to learn the true source of a > request because it is equally likely to have originated from any member > of the crowd, and indeed collaborating crowd members cannot distinguish > the originator of a request from a member who is merely forwarding the > request on behalf of another. Ofcourse, every message on the path is > encrypted to prevent local eavesdroppers along the path learning the > intended receiver of a request. i was not aware that crowds encrypted anything. if you mean node-to-node, than one bad node exposes *all* its traffic. add a couple of bad nodes working together... then encryption is almost worthless. the problem w/ crowds is it is too easy to trace traffic, period. anybody who can trace freenet requests could just as easily trace crowds traffic. > Moreover, initiators in a Crowds network do not require network topology > knowledge, while mixmaster initiators do. knowing your topology needn't mean *everything*. i'm not sure what type of mix-net your referring to. are you referring to some trust protocols? in any event, a freenet or gnutella style discovery mechanism may suffice, and any vulnerabilities are the lesser of crowds'. Bill _______________________________________________ freenet-tech mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.freenetproject.org/mailman/listinfo/tech
