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The Darknet Project: netroots activists dream of global mesh network

arstechnica.com

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Re: The Darknet Project: netroots activists dream of global mesh network

#11

Post by rmc »

davedx wrote: post #6
conanite wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overlaying on existing infrastructure is a faster way to get up and running, but ultimately a darknet that depends on another network is vulnerable to that network's centralized 'off' button.

See, that's what I didn't get about the article: DARPA intended the Internet to be built against single points of failure. Where is the Internet's 'off button'? Sure, there are exchanges and backbones that are more important than others (e.g. LINX in London), but it takes sustained and continuous efforts by a government to even come close to filtering/censoring the Internet effectively.

it takes sustained and continuous efforts by a government to even come close to filtering/censoring the Internet effectively

Yes, and they (government) are the sort of people who sometimes want to censor speech & the internet. Some countries have filtered the internet before, this is not an abstract problem.

Re: The Darknet Project: netroots activists dream of global mesh network

#12

Post by rmc »

Looks interesting, but it seems to be just a talking shop at the moment, without any actual goods to show yet.

it's hard to imagine that TDP will ever move beyond the conceptual stage. The group behind the effort is big on ideas but short on technical solutions for rolling out a practical implementation

I like the idea of using WiFi as hardware, since it's a technology that's almost everywhere now.

Re: The Darknet Project: netroots activists dream of global mesh network

#13

Post by eli »

feral wrote: post #9
davedx wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, that's what I didn't get about the article: DARPA intended the Internet to be built against single points of failure. Where is the Internet's 'off button'? Sure, there are exchanges and backbones that are more important than others (e.g. LINX in London), but it takes sustained and continuous efforts by a government to even come close to filtering/censoring the Internet effectively.

What people generally say is that the net was designed to be robust against things like a nuclear strike taking out some part of the network. That is very different from saying that it can't be turned off, by a government with the power to legally compel infrastructure operators to do things. I'd say that the US government, if it wanted to, could turn off the Internet, for most of its citizens, over the course of a f…

Forget the power of the courts, the US government outright owns some significant pieces of the internet infrastructure.

Re: The Darknet Project: netroots activists dream of global mesh network

#14

Post by [deleted] »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #7
conanite wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overlaying on existing infrastructure is a faster way to get up and running, but ultimately a darknet that depends on another network is vulnerable to that network's centralized 'off' button.

This is true. I think it's the only practical approach given current technology though. When somebody comes up with a £50 home wifi access point that has a range of a mile or more inside an urban environment, that is when we'll get a proper darknet.

[deleted]

Re: The Darknet Project: netroots activists dream of global mesh network

#15

Post by giberson »

I remember hearing about China usurping 15% of western internet traffic for 18 minutes. This was accomplished by having nodes report as being the next closest hop in the network path to the packet destination. In a decentralized darknet project, I imagine such an issue being much more widespread. In fact, I would imagine a darknet project would actually play in to the hands of the government. It would be perfectly plausible to infest the darknet with millions of your own nodes reporting as the next best hops thus inserting themselves in the middle of all darknet traffic able to analyze data as it flows through the system. Obviously, a darknet would utilize encryption for traffic but all bets are off when you potentially have a constant man in the middle and no centralized authority on trusts. What's worse, and more to the point of playing into the hands of the government is that a darknet would give them (the government) a concentrated focus area. If I were to categorize the percentage of traffic that was "interesting" for regular internet traffic vs. the percentage of "interesting" traffic of all darknet traffic then I would imagine the darknet having a much higher ratio of noteworthy to junk traffic. If I had a limited amount of resources to invest in analyzing and decoding secure traffic I would obviously point my tools at the most richly dense data source.

Re: The Darknet Project: netroots activists dream of global mesh network

#16

Post by joelthelion »

law wrote: post #8

After reading the article and skimming some posts on their subreddit, I think the idea generally concerns the capabilities of consumer electronics to 'replicate' the Internet in a completely decentralized fashion. By doing so, there's no central authority managing your packets, and if you want to visit a particular node (i.e., to visit a web site), the problem becomes analogous to the stochastic shortest path problem…

Most NP-complete problems can be approximated quickly enough for practical purposes.

Decentralized routing is a hard problem, but there has been a lot of research with pretty convincing results. I'm not sure if it scales to the size of the internet, though.

Re: The Darknet Project: netroots activists dream of global mesh network

#17

Post by mike-cardwell »

conanite wrote: post #4
mike-cardwell wrote: post #3

I can't help but think that projects to overlay a darknet on our existing Internet infrastructure are several orders of magnitude more likely to succeed.

Overlaying on existing infrastructure is a faster way to get up and running, but ultimately a darknet that depends on another network is vulnerable to that network's centralized 'off' button.

Perhaps the best design would allow both. A darknet which seemlessly routes over independent mesh networks and the Internet. Ultimately, the Internet is going to have to play a part in such a network. How else is data going to travel between cities and across oceans?

Re: The Darknet Project: netroots activists dream of global mesh network

#18

Post by law »

joelthelion wrote: post #16
law wrote: post #8

After reading the article and skimming some posts on their subreddit, I think the idea generally concerns the capabilities of consumer electronics to 'replicate' the Internet in a completely decentralized fashion. By doing so, there's no central authority managing your packets, and if you want to visit a particular node (i.e., to visit a web site), the problem becomes analogous to the stochastic shortest path problem…

Most NP-complete problems can be approximated quickly enough for practical purposes. Decentralized routing is a hard problem, but there has been a lot of research with pretty convincing results. I'm not sure if it scales to the size of the internet, though.

That's the point, though: I don't know if you can find an 'approximate' solution to decentralized routing, since you need precision. Do you have any peer-reviewed articles evidencing these convincing results? I'd be extremely interested in learning some more about this.

Re: The Darknet Project: netroots activists dream of global mesh network

#19

Post by wmf »

conanite wrote: post #2

"The US State Department seems to view decentralized darknets as an important area of research for empowering free expression abroad ." (my emphasis). Depressing!

To be fair, another interpretation is that darknets are not needed in the US because you can use the regular Internet for free expression.

Re: The Darknet Project: netroots activists dream of global mesh network

#20

Post by muyuu »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #7
conanite wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overlaying on existing infrastructure is a faster way to get up and running, but ultimately a darknet that depends on another network is vulnerable to that network's centralized 'off' button.

This is true. I think it's the only practical approach given current technology though. When somebody comes up with a £50 home wifi access point that has a range of a mile or more inside an urban environment, that is when we'll get a proper darknet.

There are wimax routers that already make it possible, but the vast majority of people want simple wifi. It does the job and most importantly it's what the ISP installs for them.

There is not a good evolutionarily stable strategy that leads to 1-mile-range wifi becoming standard. At least not now and not any time soon.

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