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

[Paul Gardner-Stephen]

Thank you both for clear and concise summaries of these issues.

Paul.

On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 5:12 AM, Michael Rogers
<michael at briarproject.org> wrote:
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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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