So there is a potential threat against opennet that we need to think about how we can either address or mitigate, hopefully without making Freenet's performance any worse.
I call it the Barlow attack, because I've noticed that John Perry Barlow seems to be connected to everyone I know on various social networking websites :-) The attack is two-stage: 1) The attacker attempts to connect to as many opennet peers as possible, and maintain open connections to them. It does this by announcing a lot, accepting as many connections as possible, and trying to respond to requests promptly with a good success rate so that peers stay connected. The attacker may do this using a number of nodes The attacker records the key of every single insert and request coming from every peer. 2) Then, let's say that someone uploads a large file, and the attacker would like to find the uploader. They simply look at all the pieces of this insert, and identify the peer from which most of these originated. If they happen to have a connection to the uploader, then there is a decent chance that this peer is the original inserter. We can make this attack more difficult by thwarting either or both of these stages, or at least making them more difficult. For example, we could make 1) more difficult if, any time we see two peers in the came class-B address range, we disconnect from both of them, or at least never route anything to either of them. It may not be possible to completely prevent this attack, which is why we do encourage people to use darknet mode as soon as they are able, particularly if they have legitimate cause for concern. Thoughts? Ian. -- Ian Clarke CEO, SenseArray Email: ian at sensearray.com Ph: +1 512 422 3588 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/attachments/20101202/a1474261/attachment.html>
