Hi, and some comments

Peter Todd retep@penguinpowered.com
Tue, 27 Feb 2001 20:24:48 -0500



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On Tue, Feb 27, 2001 at 03:53:53AM -0800, Wei Dai wrote:
> > I notice that people frequently neglect to bear-in-mind the goals of a
> > system when criticising features of it. If Freenet didn't drop files
> > then it could eventually become full, which would be unacceptable, and
> > would provide a trivial attack against it.  A MojoNation-style economy
> > is not acceptable either as we believe that people should be able to
> > publish information regardless of their personal wealth.  There are
> > other reasons too.
>=20
> How does Freenet prevent an attacker from inserting so much garbage that
> most useful files are dropped, or people from using it to trade huge files
> without contributing resources back to the system?

It doesn't. A "drop piles of data onto one node and request it from
another" attack could do some real damage. An insertion is going to
take a maximum of 100 times more bandwidth then the attacker
uses. (max hops is 100) On request it would probably be closer to 5-15
times more bandwidth depending on how well the routing is working.
=20
However any such attack could be politically infeasable if Freenet got
popular enough. The amount of data being transfered around the
internet as a whole would cripple the internet itself. Currently the
freenet routing doesn't take internet-level closeness into account so
the real bandwidth consumed by Freenet is nodes * requests per second
* average number of freenet hopes * average number of real hops. Under
large-scale attack that would be a staggering amount of bandwidth.

--=20
retep@penguinpowered.com http://retep.tripod.com=20
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