Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

bluesky - Re: Hi, and some comments

bluesky AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Global-Scale Distributed Storage Systems

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Peter Todd <retep AT penguinpowered.com>
  • To: Global-Scale Distributed Storage Systems <bluesky AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>, devel AT freenetproject.org
  • Subject: Re: Hi, and some comments
  • Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2001 20:24:48 -0500

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.
>
> 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.

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.

--
retep AT penguinpowered.com http://retep.tripod.com

Attachment: pgp7LU20ABntV.pgp
Description: PGP signature




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page