Re: [tor-talk] Data storage in cached-descriptors

["Fabio Pietrosanti (naif)" <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 5/30/12 2:08 PM, krishna e bera wrote:
> On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 08:38:10AM +0200, Fabio Pietrosanti (naif) wrote:
>> i've been thinking some days ago that the Tor infrastructure maybe a
>> very valuable infrastructure also for other software that would like to
>> stay distributed without a "central directory".
>>
>> In order to do so, a server-software for a distributed network, may also
>> run a Tor Relay and write it's meta-data to cached-descriptors, de-facto
>> relying on Tor's Directory Authority infrastructure.
> 
> Perhaps this will work as a way to get more relays,
> but i would be worried about the increased temptation to seize them
> in order to extract the distributed data.
> In addition, if it works well, such a secondary function could 
> become important enough to alter development of Tor's primary function.

Well, think if the data you would store would be a bunch of byte, such as:
- An identifier of the software (5-6 byte)
- An identifier of some metadata (2-4 byte?)
- An pointer to extended-metadata (ex: an URL convention)

Maybe in less than 20-25byte you would be able to leverage the Tor
infrastructure:
- To have a centralized/decentralized index of your software node
- To get some degree of protection against sybil attack
- To get authentication/identification data (The RSA keys of a node)

So basically "on top of Tor software and Tor Infrastructure" it would be
possible to build other kind of networks, given that they participate to
the Tor network itself.


-naif
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