On 10/13/19, jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:

>Hops, alone, don't add much protection beyond
a good routing of 3 to 9 or so. They're more for fucking
with traditional jurisdictional log reconstruction trails,
than dealing with GPA's, GT-1's and GAA'a including Sybil
that can just follow traffic patterns across the mesh bisecting
in real time, or more generally... sort and match traffic patterns
between all sets of two edge hosts.

Okay, I was just joshing about the "256 hops" part.  While there may not be any hard limit built into the system, I believe I later said that 16 hops would be enough for anybody.

(Somehow, didn't I remember about 35 years ago that Bill Gates said something like, ""640 kilobytes of main memory would be enough for anybody?   We see where THAT led!)


>If applied together with other tech, especially
regarding nets where you want any kind of
useable stream (even delivery of storage or msgs
is in a way a stream), beyond those hops is going to get
really unperformant, and less security return than thought.

>You can demo today by recompile Tor and Phantom and tweak I2P,
to set arbitrary hop levels beyond single digits... are you more
secure from G* as result... probably not.

However, one use of "many" hops would be the generation of chaff 'traffic'.  The goal, presumably, of adding chaff is to disguise the real traffic.  To do that, it would be desireable to  make that chaff look as much as possible like real traffic.  A packet sent through all, or a large number of nodes will have a genuine path.  Assuming the spy bugs one node, he will see traffic come in, and leave for another.  Just like an ordinary instance of traffic.  

An alternative would be a system where each node spontaneously generates chaff.   Spying on a node would see such spontaneous 'traffic' generations.  Maybe it would be clearer that that was chaff?

But I'm just throwing out ideas.  I assume that the 'chaff' issue has been professionally detailed in some academic papers.

             Jim Bell