On Jan 28 2008, Robert Hailey wrote: >Inside China (in this case) >there would be a viable freenet, and outside there would be a viable >freenet but due to the few connections between them, keys could not be >effectively fetched or put one to the other.
Unfortunately even if we can solve this problem in the accidental case (by using networks IDs for example), I don't see how we can solve it in the deliberate case: someone creates a chain of Sybil nodes that occupies a large region of the key space, so the attacker controls all traffic in and out of that region. There only need to be two connections between the Sybil chain and the outside world to keep the chain from collapsing into a point, so the attack will work even in a pure darknet as long as there are at least two gullible users. And the Sybil nodes don't even need to misbehave - they can swap normally and respond normally to requests, but the small bandwidth between the Sybil region and the rest of the network will make that region of the key space effectively useless. And of course if there are only two connections to the outside world, the attacker only really needs two nodes: the rest of the chain can just be simulated. Cheers, Michael
