On Monday, October 21, 2019, 04:00:16 AM PDT, grarpamp
   <grarpamp@gmail.com> wrote:

   On 10/13/19, jim bell <[1]jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
   >> arbitrarily-long hops (256 hops?  65,536 hops?
   >> An even larger power-of-2 hops?)
   >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

References

   1. mailto:jdb10987@yahoo.com