[Commotion-dev] Whether to use encrypted meshing, how to accept new nodes?

[Michael Rogers]

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On 11/12/12 03:31, Paul Gardner-Stephen wrote:
> I need to get my head back into it again, but is the trusted
> central authority necessary if network addresses are public keys?

Yes. In Perlman's original design (robust flooding), nodes are
identified by their public keys. The central authority distributes a
signed list of nodes that are authorised to generate packets and nodes
sign the packets they generate. Each node reserves resources (buffer
space and link bandwidth) for each authorised source, and checks the
signatures on packets before allowing them to use reserved resources.

Reserving resources makes it possible to ensure that if there's a
fault-free route from a given source to a given destination, packets
can pass along it, regardless of the traffic generated by faulty
nodes. Without the central authority there'd be no way to limit the
number of node identities, and therefore no way to reserve sufficient
resources to ensure that packets could pass along fault-free routes.

Perlman's later designs (robust link state routing from the 1988
thesis and hierarchical link state routing from the 2005 paper) are
more efficient and scalable than robust flooding, but they still
depend on a central authority to limit the creation of node identities.

Cheers,
Michael
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