Graph theory question

George Violaris violarisgeorge at gmail.com
Fri Oct 27 12:01:35 PDT 2017


On 10/27/2017 5:43 AM, James A. Donald wrote:
> Purported peers that have only one connection are clients of the 
> entity to which they are connected, and he is responsible for their 
> good behavior, similarly those that have only two connections.  Three 
> good peer connections make you a peer of all the other peers, two good 
> connections do not make you a peer - don't get equal treatment to the 
> vertices by which you are connected, get graylist treatment.

What if you only have two good connections but each of your two 
connections have 3+ connections - how would good peers with only two 
connections be able to gain reputation in such a system? i.e. if the 
connections can be laterally traversed in order to reach any connected 
node, how would the other nodes be able to know if a peer is honest or 
if it has been spoofed?

I believe this is actually how the recent ransomware spread in networks. 
They use systems that trust other systems. In order to prevent such 
attacks, the networking protocols need to be amended. An additional 
negotiation sublayer can be created which asks the other peer a question 
only they can know the answer to. This can be something such as 
encrypting all connections at the tcp/ip level, or applying something 
like proof of work to make it uneconomical for sybils (but this actually 
only solves the issue in a probabilistic way).

./gv



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