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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

#41

Post by Locke1689 »

tomjen3 wrote: post #27
mike-cardwell wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Between cities? In the cars of people who bring their laptop with them home from work. Across oceans? Never underestimate the speed of a ten foot container filled with 2 terabyte harddrive :)

Never underestimate the speed of a ten foot container filled with 2 terabyte harddrive

No. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck filled with harddrives. Always underestimate the speed of said truck.

Networking is easy when latency doesn't matter. Unfortunately, it does.

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

#42

Post by peterwwillis »

saucerful wrote: post #34
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.

That is pretty damn cool, but I think for a serious "alternate Internet" to succeed, OSI layers 1 & 2 should not matter. An application installed by a regular user needs to be able to do most of the heavy lifting with most generic off-the-shelf hardware to get a really decentralized open alternative to take off like wildfire.

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

#43

Post by bh42222 »

wmf wrote: post #19
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.

Like donating to whistleblowing websites like WikiLeaks.

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

#44

Post by gbelote »

skore wrote: post #38
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'm not sure I understand the benefit of it being easier for more people to run man-in-the-middle attacks on the network. I doubt the government would rely on such a network for sensitive information, so it'd probably end up being citizens spying on other citizens (or worse, e.g. phishing).

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

#45

Post by sneak »

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…

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

If you control a vast majority of the nodes, this is simply incorrect.

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

#46

Post by pldpld »

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…

Sep Kamvar has done a significant amount of research addressing precisely the problems you describe. The conclusion being that (in non-pathological cases, which would likely include the case you vaguely describe) one can design network architectures using reputation mechanisms such that malicious peers are found and routed around. See http://kamvar.org/publications, specifically "Numerical Algorithms for Personalized Search in Large-Scale Self-Organizing Information Networks" (the first Book) esp. Chapter 9, I highly recommend it.

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

#47

Post by jyrkesh »

bh42222 wrote: post #43
wmf wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Like donating to whistleblowing websites like WikiLeaks.

To be fair, that was more of a private business decision on the part of PayPal than it was a government mandate. But I get what you're saying, and I agree that internet is not as open, even in the United States, as it could and should be.

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

#48

Post by rmc »

skore wrote: post #38
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…

Ordinary users would not have the same power as governments because they would not have the money to run as many nodes as a gov or big corp.

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

#49

Post by jxcole »

sneak wrote: post #45
jxcole wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There is no way to back track traffic and discover who sent the request. If you control a vast majority of the nodes, this is simply incorrect.

Sort of. The only way to tell if a person made a request is if you control all the nodes that this person is connected to. If you do not control even one node that a person is connected to, there is always the possibility that the request came from this other node, not the real node. This is because the difference between making a request for something on your behalf and making the request on someone else's behalf looks exactly the same as far as another node is concerned.

This is how freenet works. Of course, in freenet there is a time to live associated with each request so it will die eventually if, for example, the searched for item is not present on the network at that time. You could figure out that it's from a particular node by seeing what the time to live is from that node, but small amounts of random variance in time to live values can effectively ensure that both requests don't live forever and that it is suitably difficult to determine the origin of the requesting node.

Now, it is certainly possible with enough concerted effort to find out what a user is doing with some statistical probability that a user is looking at something, but you can rarely be absolutely sure.

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

#50

Post by devindotcom »

This is interesting. I've been toying with a darknet idea, but it's not going to mirror the internet. "My" version is limited to plain text and packets no larger than 1kb, if even that. It'll show up on TechCrunch eventually, but I want to talk with some people first.
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