[Freedombox-discuss] Freedombox Mesh Network Simulator
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Hi Ben,
On 22/06/12 21:31, Ben Mendis wrote:
> Look at it this way, what you're talking about is already possible.
> Your ISP can already see all your traffic and they can analayze
> everything you're doing. If the government comes knocking they will
> have to turn over their logs or tap your line. With mesh
> networking, you are mitigating that risk by spreading your traffic
> among a large number of peer nodes. Sure, some of those nodes might
> be malicious, or some of them could be coercable, but it's less
> likely that any one of them will be the exclusive transport for all
> your traffic, so they are only seeing a part of your traffic.
This is only true if the routing protocol prevents malicious nodes
from attracting traffic to themselves. There are known attacks of that
kind against various ad hoc/mesh protocols [1][2][3].
Also, the malicious nodes may genuinely have the best routes - if
someone parks a van outside your house with an uncongested high-speed
uplink, any sensible routing protocol will send most of your traffic
through the van instead of spreading it around your neighbours.
I don't mean to be totally pessimistic - if someone has to park a van
outside your house that's better than if they can just ask the ISP for
a copy of all your traffic. But I don't think we should pretend that
mesh protocols provide privacy, anonymity or robustness against
malicious nodes - they don't.
Cheers,
Michael
[1] http://www.monarch.cs.cmu.edu/monarch-papers/tikreport.pdf
[2] http://prisms.cs.umass.edu/brian/pubs/aran.icnp02.pdf
[3] http://monarch.cs.rice.edu/monarch-papers/wise03orig.pdf
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