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The Darknet Project: netroots activists dream of global mesh network

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

#31

Post by blhack »

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!

This was something that was discussed pretty heavily on the various IRC channels during the 2009 Iranian Election.

Cell phones, wifi, etc. had mostly been cut off in Tehran, which is where there were some really horrible things happening that the rest of world needed to know about. In a situation like that, a mesh network full of wifi devices that could communicate with either HAM operators, or satellite internet operators would have been really helpful.

A lot of people were actually surprised that the CIA didn't have something like this sitting on the shelf ready to be distributed. (And this is where I start sounding like one of those people, but the CIA has been involved in revolutions in places like South America. A communications kit seems like something that they would employ.)

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

#32

Post by flyingbuttress »

giberson wrote: post #15

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 pl…

I think the goal of a darknet is more to prevent censorship than to ensure privacy. As you said, any untrusted nodes could easily reveal a user's location and intent.

I would much prefer a network that piggybacks on the existing infrastructure and poses as innocuous traffic through stenography or encryption.

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

#33

Post by conanite »

muyuu wrote: post #20
mike-cardwell wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd love to have a wimax router, but aren't they expensive? And require a license to operate?

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

#34

Post by saucerful »

peterwwillis wrote: post #21

I'd like to note that "the Internet" is a vast, broadly-scoped amalgamation of routers and different network topologies. They don't use one kind of hardware or software to manage it all. Any successor or parallel alternative network should be as (if not more) flexible to achieve it's goals. I'd also like to suggest that the network be powered purely by standard Internet client machines and off-the-shelf hardware. Cus…

Lucky for us, the new IEEE 802.11 was ratified in September and includes (finally) 802.11s for mesh networking. There is support in Linux and FreeBSD for several of the most popular wireless drivers. The open source router firmware dd-wrt also supports 11s.

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

#35

Post by jxcole »

giberson wrote: post #15

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 pl…

Man in the middle attacks may not work as well as you think. While it is possible to create false information using this darknet mechanism, it is possible using things like PGP to ensure that you are getting data from the same node. Of course, you have to figure out how to set it up right from the beginning; if someone messes with you before you know what their key is supposed to be, they can feed you false information.

You might be able to overcome this by using a many-to-many authentication mechanism. But realistically, what could the government hope to accomplish by feeding you false information? (this is the only thing they are likely able to do). Consider:

There is no way to back track traffic and discover who sent the request.

Once you realize a source is feeding false information, you know to never trust that source again.

It is easy to imagine a decentralized rating system for the quality of information provided by various keys on the network. Keep in mind you can't really fake who you are. You are your public key, no one else can publish under your public key but you.

EDIT: I highly recommend reading the freent paper: http://freenetproject.org/papers/ddisrs.pdf

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

#36

Post by awesomesauce555 »

eli wrote: post #13
feral wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which ones? Aside from a few DNS servers and some nice to have services (time.nist.gov or whatever), I can't think of any offhand.

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

#38

Post by skore »

giberson wrote: post #15

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 pl…

The good thing about the Darknet plan is that it levels the playing field - Sure, Governments might suddenly have access to influencing the infrastructure the same way that corporations have now - but I would argue that Governments have quite a lot of influence already. The important difference would be that ordinary citizens would have that very same power.

Unless you live in a predominantly authoritarian state (and I guess disagreement about this is what most of these discussions come down to, in the end), keeping government in check by empowering the people with insight and access to its processes is usually what enables a democracy.

Your point about darknet traffic being inherently more interesting is insightful, but I'm not sure where it gets us. The same can be said about TOR (and there have been attacks on this, too, as well as TOR posing the same issue of possibly being 'infected' by too many nodes of a single attacker) and I guess it' really just a technical challenge, in the end.

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

#39

Post by flyingbuttress »

jxcole wrote: post #35
giberson wrote: post #15

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 pl…

Man in the middle attacks may not work as well as you think. While it is possible to create false information using this darknet mechanism, it is possible using things like PGP to ensure that you are getting data from the same node. Of course, you have to figure out how to set it up right from the beginning; if someone messes with you before you know what their key is supposed to be, they can feed you false informati…

All the government needs to know is what information is being requested, and who is requesting it.
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