Ian Clarke wrote:
We (Freenet) have been concerned about the fact that Freenet was harvestable for several years now. Around spring this year I made the observation that if human relationships form a small world network, it should be possible to assign locations to people such that we form a Kleinberg-style small world network, and thus we could make the network routable. Oskar Sandberg then suggested a way to do this, and we set about validating the concept using simulations.
I would love to learn more. Is there a white-paper or design document beyond these slides from DefCon [1]?
Are you aware of any current or proposed f2f networks for which concealment of user activity is not a goal?
Well, I think of the links between two friends in f2f to be not solely communication channels but also to have other meaning. For example, if friends transmit music files to one another, then in addition to any privacy properties that the network may have, it also serves as a decentralized, attack-resistant recommendation engine for music. Honestly, this area of research is ripe for exploration, but I can give you at least a couple of examples. Doceur set it up with a claimed general negative result in "The Sybil Attack" in 2002 [2]. But his general negative result isn't quite true, as disproven by e.g. Advogato, 2000 [3, 4, 5]. Recently George Danezis, Chris Lesniewski-Laas, M. Frans Kaashoek, and Ross Anderson smashed these two ideas together and mixed in some DHT routing: [6]. [6] is an excellent paper, which proposes a concrete DHT design and which really nails the fact that the introduction graph or "bootstrap graph" contains information which can defeat the allegedly undefeatable Sybil Attack. [6] references some related work which looks interesting, but I haven't followed those links yet myself. I guess [6] is somewhat relevant to the Freenet v0.7 design. So, uh, anyway, this shows that there is interest in the notion of using friendship networks for purposes other than privacy, namely attack resistance of DHT routing and attack resistance of metadata [7 (self-citation)]. I think there's a lot more value to be mined from this concept, and I'm really glad that it has finally gotten the attention of some p2p researchers. Oh, and here's another perspective on this idea -- a post I wrote to my blog a few years ago suggesting that all sorts of DHT innovations which were intended to improve network performance could be applied to attack resistance: "trust is just another topology" [8]. Regards, Zooko [1] http://freenetproject.org/papers/vegas1_dc.pdf [2] http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/douceur02sybil.html [3] http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html [4] http://www.levien.com/thesis/compact.pdf [5] http://www.levien.com/free/tmetric-HOWTO.html [6] http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/cgi-bin/pubs-date.cgi?match=Sybil-resistant+DHT+ro... ting [7] http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/p2p2001/view/e_sess/1200 [8] http://www.zooko.com/log-2003-01.html#d2003-01-23-trust_is_just_another_topo... ogy _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers@zgp.org http://zgp.org/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers _______________________________________________ Here is a web page listing P2P Conferences: http://www.neurogrid.net/twiki/bin/view/Main/PeerToPeerConferences ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]