On Sun, 7 Jul 2002, u Uler wrote:

> What about people who want to be guaranteed that they get a hit. Chris said
> that he would like to be able to set his HTL to 255 and scour the network
> for the data he wants.

But a node's freedom to arbitrarily change the HTL of any search passing
through it is an important part of the protocol.  Not least because it
would be difficult to prevent nodes from doing it anyway, and if you can't
eliminate cancer nodes from the network, you can just re-define their
behavior as non-cancerous.

But also, this freedom to arbitrarily alter of HTL is a central part of
Freenet's plausible deniability doctrine.  Requesting from a node with HTL
1 doesn't indicate the presence of data on the node, because the node
might have upped the search's HTL and passed it on.

Furthermore, if the HTL of a request actually means something, then the
network becomes more vulnerable to traffic analysis.  Allowing nodes to
arbitrarily change HTL ensures that all the meta-information in a packet
is potentially untrustworthy to someone wishing to map out the network or
its behavior based on this information.

--RS



_______________________________________________
Tech mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://hawk.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech

Reply via email to