Oof, I hadn't really thought about that until now but you're totally right.
I've been a big fan of using collaborative filtering algorithms (e.g. slope
one, SVD) along with a system that actively accumulates a lot of metadata
about its own operation to filter out malicious sybils as noise because
their behavior patterns aren't similar to yours (this assumes you're a
"normal" node)

I now see this same kind of collaborative filtering would need to apply to
how the DHT operates as well (and of course there's the problem of
malicious sybils abusing your graces as a metadata host to store their junk)

On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 2:26 AM, Michael Rogers <mich...@briarproject.org>wrote:

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> Hi Tony,
>
> On 16/05/12 03:04, Tony Arcieri wrote:
> > I think tying them to public keys provides the properties you want
> > from a "proof of work" system while still making the keys
> > (particularly if they're ECDSA keys) easy to generate.
>
> I wasn't suggesting proof-of-work, I was arguing that it wouldn't
> work. (I thought Russ Weeks was proposing it, but maybe not. Sorry
> Russ if I misunderstood you.)
>
> But I don't think easily generated key pairs would solve the problem
> either. The attacker doesn't need to get a specific node ID - she only
> needs to get a set of IDs that are closer to the target than any
> innocent nodes' IDs. If key pairs are cheap to generate then she can
> simply generate key pairs until she finds a set of suitable IDs. If
> key pairs (or node IDs in general) are expensive to generate then she
> can do the same, using resources that are only a fraction of the
> innocent nodes' resources, because she spends all her CPU time on the
> problem and they don't. (I think this argument against proof-of-work
> was first made by Richard Clayton.)
>
> Raphael has pointed to a better answer, though, which is to detect the
> anomalous clump of node IDs around the target.
>
> Cheers,
> Michael
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-- 
Tony Arcieri
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