> > Seems to me that a fingerprint should suffice. Can you elaborate? What > > am I missing? > Every node in Freenet is untrusted. The only trust issues come in when > you have been speaking to a node for a long time and suddenly it appears > that its a different person (doesnt authenticate).
That's not totally true. Every auto-discovered node is untrusted (unless I trust it implicitly because a trust node trusts it, but that's tangential). However, if I meet you in the street and you hand my your node address (fingerprint included) then I can now trust any connections authenticated with the private key matching the public key which matches the fingerprint that you gave me, just as I can trust e-mail signed by you even if it comes from a different e-mail address. (this is trust on two levels. your node is authenticated so that I know it's your node, and your node is trusted because I trust you. auto-discovered nodes can be authenticated but not trusted since I don't know who's running them.) In fact, you could update your IP in my datastore just by sending me a message. I could do the authentication, see it was from you, and set the IP I reference you by accordingly. If you simply handshake me every time your change your IP, I will always be able to find your node. This doesn't help with auto-discovered nodes because they'd basically have to broadcast their new IP to the entire network. Of course if you have references to most of the nodes which have references to you (they've sent you a message) then you can handshake all of them and have updated most nodes that will want to talk to you. This is kind of like the Ian vs. Oskar update debate. You can either send everyone your new IP, or else everyone can look for your new IP when they can't find you. Another solution is to just let the node inform people about its IP whenever its sending a message. Which means that after you change your IP, you will disappear, but then slowly become known again as your send messages to the network. A balance between network traffic and efficient routing has to be decided when choosing a solution or mixture of solutions. _______________________________________________ Freenet-dev mailing list Freenet-dev at lists.sourceforge.net http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/freenet-dev
