Re: [freehaven-dev] retrieval issues

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

On Sun, Mar 25, 2001 at 05:38:04AM -0500, Roger Dingledine wrote:
> This isn't a particularly hard problem, depending on your goals. I think
> that we (or more generally, people deploying any system like this) can
> afford to make our goals pretty vague at this point, and then refine them
> as we go forward.

Gosh. I sound like a hypocrit. (My previous mail says "this is a really
hard problem.") Let me attempt to dig my way out. :)

The problem here is characterizing what sorts of protections (eg anonymity
and robustness) we want from the introduction system. It seems easy
to just have everybody know everybody and you just dump the list on
all new people.  (Yes, some people will cheat and not dump the whole
list. But if enough people are honest then it will work.)

The problem comes when you say something like "but I don't want people to
be able to get a list of all IP addresses running nodes". With Free Haven,
you aren't actually getting such a list, because the "addresses" are reply
blocks on a mix-net. With Freenet you don't have that layer of protection.

But I don't think Freenet actually aims for that level of anonymity. So
they're ok.

(But it's still an interesting problem to consider to improve the amount
of anonymity which Freenet offers without totally revamping their protocol
into something different.)

Make more sense this time?
--Roger
(Sleep...)