On Monday 17 December 2001 05:13 pm, you wrote:
> Another question to bore you guys ;)
>
> I understand a message with ahops-to-live value of 1 is sometimes still
> forwarded on, to reduce the information an attacker could get out of it.
> What I don't understand, is what information could be learned from the
> fact thatsomeone will be the last node reached on the path.
>
> For example, why would I want to know that some node at the end of the
> path replies with a Reply.NotFound message? What kind of discriminating
> information could I get from that?

It is for malicious ADJACENT nodes.  If node A has a direct connection to 
node B, node A can find out if the data exists on that node by requesting the 
file with a htl of 1.  This knowlege can be bad, as Sebastian pointed out.  
With the certain probibility of forwarding HTL 1 requests, the act of 
requesting the data can put the data on the node.  This has the benefit of 
mirroring the data and improving legal arguments.

Actually, why isn't the HTL concept abonded and replaced with a high certain 
probability?  This way nodes can't choose a HTL that they can use for gaining 
data from freenet.  Here is a table of probabilities and and average hops:

50%             1 hop
70%             1.9 hops
80%             3.1 hops
90%             6.6 hops
95%             13.5 hops
96%             17.0 hops
97%             22.8 hops
98%             34.3 hops
99%             68.0 hops

And if you want to know how I got theese values, here's the formula:
1.  probability^hops=0.5   (0.5=50%)
2.  log(probability^hops)=hops*log(probability)=log(0.5)
3.  hops=log(0.5)/log(probability)


If a node removes the request by a probabilistic chance, it could return with 
two messages, one saying the probabilty finally told it to stop searching and 
another to tell that it could not find a closer node.  If the probability did 
not fail, nodes could then continue the search with their next-closest node.


Scott Young

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