Re: Giblit Proposal

[Marc Rennhard <rennhard@tik.ee.ethz.ch>]

On Sun, 04 Jan 2004, Some Guy wrote:

> One quick dumb question: Do Minion and Tor both require you know about all the nodes like Tarzan? 
> I'm tring to work on a DHT topology where that shouldn't be the case.

Maybe you should have a look at MorphMix. MorphMix is also a circuit-
based system for low-latency applications and data transport is similar
as in tor. MorphMix nodes do not need to know about all other nodes, i.e. 
MorphMix does not require a "perfect" lookup mechanism that continuously 
keeps track of membership changes. MorphMix is optimised to scale up to 
millions of nodes in a P2P environment where every client is also a mix 
and where nodes may join and leave at any time. It also takes into account 
malicious colluding nodes and tries to prevent them from owning the critical 
first and final nodes in a circuit. Check out Roger's excellent anonymity 
bibliography page (http://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/) and have a look at 
the original WPES 2002 paper to get the basic idea. There will also be an 
updated paper about MorphMix at FC 2004.

Peer discovery/node lookup is basically solved in MorphMix, but i'm not 
completely happy with the current solution. So yes, it might profit from 
your "sloppy" DHT topology - if it can cope with very large number of
nodes.

Marc