The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work

Re:The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work by arghnoname on Friday December 04, 2015 @07:34PM (#10680193)

I think the typical approach to the bottleneck issue with regard to traffic analysis attacks is that the machines on the edges can act as mixes. They can essentially launder traffic from within their respective meshes so that any intermediary between them can't do attribution. Of course, you have to trust the mix! So what then? Then communication to them has to be encrypted and onion routed, and moreover, continuously sent (even if what is encrypted is the message, "No data here dummy, this is just chaff") and then that has to be sent along, all so the mix doesn't know that you're actually communicating anything.

It's a whole category of research really. Papers like Herd at Sigcomm and Vuvuzela at SOSP are the two latest I've seen and following references there should be helpful. I think if you look at Herd there are a few tricks in there to lower the cost of all of the chaff with the superpeers (or whatever they call them, I read it a while ago). A hybrid system that mixes meshnet schemes for local peer to peer traffic with secret sharing schemes and mixnets for more disparate networks seems workable to me. The question is what benefits does the meshnet provide over the mixnet style schemes?

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Re:The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work by PhaseMage on Friday December 04, 2015 @11:48PM (#10680922)

Thanks for the pointers, I'll look them up!

> The question is what benefits does the meshnet provide over the mixnet style schemes?

My Isochronous grid/mesh protocol is designed to operate at the network layer. The TCP/IP Internet has: * High and Unbounded Latency * Wasteful, Underused Links * Low Redundancy * A Tendency to Centralize Power * Choke-point Surveillance and Censorship * Disaster Vulnerabilities * Tragedy of the Commons

I think a mesh network with non-centralized per-byte pricing can make a big dent in all of these.

A meshnet built on top of a starnet is like trying to build a road network on top of a train network: It's not economically feasible and ultimately pointless.

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Re:The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work by arghnoname on Saturday December 05, 2015 @11:29AM (#10682333)

I see. I'm not sure if all of these things are fundamental to TCP itself, but instead are economic and regulatory results. Something to think about. It's not my area so I don't have specific cites, but data centers are effectively meshes. I know there has been work on different ways to transit data within them other than stock TCP/IP. Network coding, for instance, is a pretty cool way to splat data among a whole bunch of interconnected people and UDP to all your peers is a good medium to do it over. There's also work on multipath TCP (MCTCP, others) to help utilize other idle links.

I'd check the literature on that, typically under the data center track at networking conferences.

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