Fwd: [cryptography] The Compromised Internet

[Eugen Leitl]

On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 12:54:31AM -0700, coderman wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 11:51 PM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
> > ...
> > I'm optimizing against people who walk up, and dismantle your
> > wireless mesh, or down the Internet in your country.
> 
> down the Internet; the mesh lives on.

If the VPN bridges go down, you're back to mice and pumpkins.
There are obvious values in urban-area public meshes, and long
distance WLAN, but it's no way to deliver messages globally,
even as simple as texting equivalent. The buck does definitely
stop when surf is lapping at your toes.

What is exactly is wrong with frequent fliers carrying
smartphones with http://sourceforge.net/projects/bytewalla/
or similar?

http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:541972/FULLTEXT01.pdf
 
> down the mesh? hope you've got capacity for a truck roll to tens of millions!
> 
> 
> > ... It's really
> > hard to jam the sky, especially in VIS range.
> 
> not true. :/

You need to track a given small, rapidly moving patch of 
sky in realtime, whether by parabol dish, amateur astronomic 
instrument, or phased array flat plate or half-dome. The 
bird is serving hundreds or thousands people ground-side 
as it passes by. If you really want to jam all these
at the same time you'll need a nuke.

Taking out the bird from the ground turns a game of
cat and mouse, if you're dumping phonesats by the
satbusload -- these are short-lived, anyway, and need
to be constantly replenished. Orbital denial against 
small cross-section targets in a really low orbit which 
can be replenished cheaply will make every country with 
space access very mad at you, which is dangerous to your 
health.

None of the approaches are mutually exclusive.
Use meshes, link them up via VPN tunnels across
Internet, use DTN with avian carriers, or phonesats.