[Commotion-dev] Quick Update

[Ben West]

On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 4:41 AM, Michael Rogers <m-- at gmx.com> wrote:

>
> > Well, DOSing communication is generally pretty easy on Wi-Fi: just jam
> > it. Take a microwave oven, connect it to a strong reflector (Sat dish?)
> and
> > direct it at the mesh crowd ;-) Zap!
> > Very low tech. The obvious counter strategy is to simply be very close
> together.
> > Then the jammers signal is weaker than yours. A jammer always has to
> invest lots of
> > energy to jam a large area (signal strength_at_receiver =
> initial_strength * 1/distance^2)
>
> Wow, I hadn't even thought about attacks against the physical layer! But
> jamming a large mesh would require a lot of resources, as you say,
> whereas by attacking the routing protocol you could potentially disable
> the whole mesh from a single point.
>
>
Besides the microwave oven augmented with an aerial, XKCD also points out
this fundamental flaw in any security scheme requiring human memory:
http://xkcd.com/538/

On a more serious note, I am curious if folks on the list have experience
using tinc for secure tunnels thru production meshes (= being used by folks
not on a OLSR/OpenWRT/Commotion/etc listserv ;).  I understand the routing
plane will continue to be vulnerable to outages brought on by brute force
DOS of some variety.

-- 
Ben West
me at benwest.name
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