Theseus DHT Protocol (2018) • Hacker News Board

Re: Theseus DHT Protocol (2018)

#41

Post by anacrolix » Wed, Jun 21, 2023, 10:12 AM UTC

sohle wrote: post #32

anacrolix wrote: post #28

I like the ideas in this, and that it's got changes that allow it to work over stream based protocols, which means webrtc and tor. However DHTs (Kademlia at least) aren't efficient on a large scale if they're not built on packet oriented protocols. I don't know what the solution is, maybe allowing TCP is just a compromise you have to make sometimes.

Hi, I wrote this post, and this is something I was wondering about the whole time. It seemed like TCP was a necessary compromise, but I wasn't sure how painful the overhead would be. If there are any notable examples you know of where this went wrong (or right) I'd be interested.

If it helps, you may find that when you scale your DHT to 10000+ nodes you will start to have issues with building on TCP. Of course many DHTs never get to that scale. IPFS is an example of one that sits just above that mark and can't figure out why things don't work well.

For comparison, the BitTorrent DHT has 20 MILLION nodes and works fantastically.

Re: Theseus DHT Protocol (2018)

#42

Post by h0p3 » Wed, Jun 21, 2023, 7:08 PM UTC

sohle wrote: post #35

orthecreedence wrote: post #19

Cool project, which lead me to this post: https://eli.sohl.com/2020/06/10/sybil-defense.html I'm in this space right now (Sybil-resistant DHTs) for an identity project and finding things like this is absolute gold for me. Is there a good place to find more articles on modern sybil protection mechanisms (other than the proof-of-whatever blockchain bs)?

Hi, I wrote this post, and I just wanted to say thanks for the kind words - this research was a lot of fun to do and I'm glad it has an audience. The "best" resources I know of are the ones I cited in that post, though do bear in mind it's a few years old. That said, I did want to make sure you didn't miss this companion piece: https://eli.sohl.com/2020/06/05/dht-size-estimation.html which is applicable to detecting…

Just wanted to say thank you, again. Your project gave me a lot to think about.

Re: Theseus DHT Protocol (2018)

#43

Post by boramalper » Fri, Jun 23, 2023, 7:30 AM UTC

sohle wrote: post #31

boramalper wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAC† but I think the use of Noise Protocol is completely bogus. Regardless of your protocol of choice, you cannot encrypt things end-to-end if you cannot authenticate who is at the other end that you're encrypting for—hence the use of "safety numbers"[0] in Signal, "certificate authorities"[1] in TLS, "web of trust"[2] in PGP, and the list goes on and on... This is at best an obfuscation attempt to make fingerprint…

Hi, I wrote this post. Let me use your comment as a chance to talk about what I was going for with the use of Noise here. You're correct that part of the assumption inherent in end-to-end encryption is that you've got the other end right; otherwise, MitM attacks become possible. To prevent this, Social apps like Signal (also WhatsApp and many others) give you, roughly speaking, a way of confirming that both endpoints…

> This is technically still MitM'able, but only if you catch two parties on their very first connection

Ah, haven't realised it was Trust On First Use (TOFU)--neat!