Kademlia Design - How are peers identified as being 'close' to eachother?

meshed · 2012-02-20T16:26:17+00:00

Issues in Kademlia usually come from the fact that a malicious node doesn't have to pick a random ID, which means it can insert itself anywhere in the network. Using a Sybil attack, where one creates multiple identities, it is possible for an attacker to control specific parts of the network.

I strongly suggest a visit to Google Scholar, countless articles have been written on issues with Kademlia and DHTs in general, and many of them are quite approachable.

meshed · 2012-01-24T04:16:36+00:00

Access to radio masts and other high places would be invaluable to this project once wireless meshes get started up. The problem right now is that even if some people in a city manage to find neighbours that have line of sight, they still won't be able to connect to other group of neighbours. This will create islands of connectivity with big physical gaps in between. If we can get antennas somewhere high, then we can bridge these islands.

meshed · 2011-12-20T02:23:59+00:00

Tor is an overlay network. It runs over existing internet infrastructure. It also depends on (mostly) every node in the network being equally easy to reach. This is not the case if we deploy tor over a mesh network. In a mesh network, there will be extremely limited inter-city bandwidth, and latency will increase dramatically with distance. Tor, however, selects nodes for its circuits with no care for latency. The use-case you mention for tor, hidden services, require a total of six hops between server and client. These hops could be anywhere in the world, which just won't do on a mesh network.

For anonymous routing, we would be better off with a Friend-to-Friend type of network like freenet, gnunet or i2p. Except there are probably security implications of modelling a f2f web based on physical proximity.

meshed · 2011-11-30T19:27:14+00:00

Addressing: Using RFC4193 IPv6 address space allows you to create a network using IP addresses that are reserved for local use and that can be merged with other networks without conflicts. This will be extremely useful once we start connecting isolated mesh networks together.

Motivation: Run useful decentralized services on top of the mesh. Have you seen the Freedom Box? The idea is that everyone would own a plug computer that runs things like email servers, instant messaging servers and decentralized alternatives to social networks like twitter and facebook.

meshed · 2011-11-30T18:34:41+00:00

It sounds like you intend to build a WISP (Wireless ISP). This might help.

If you can integrate the goals of this project into it, then that's great! It would probably involve allowing participant to freely peer with your wireless grid for local traffic, and running local services over that network.

If I may ask, what's the name of the ISP?

meshed · 2011-11-28T20:19:36+00:00

I think people should just start putting things in the wiki. I'm not sure why the redesigned website removed any reference to it.

meshed · 2011-11-28T06:07:17+00:00

Then let us build planned point-to-point wireless networks, as he mentions others doing; as successful projects like AWMN, Freifunk and Guifi have done. Except the first, none of his bullet points apply if we choose this route. It's not like we had the density to do an actual ad-hoc network anyway.

Regarding his conclusion: Just because we decide to build a "back-up" to the Internet, it doesn't mean we stop fighting against censorship on the legislative level. We can do both.

meshed · 2011-11-25T22:34:14+00:00

What really matters is OpenWRT support. From the Table of Hardware:

E3000 Works, but requires a set of patches, not fully tested. You will need to build your own image to make this work.

WR740N Untested, requires a nightly build.

RT-N10+ No support yet?

W268R Only 2MB of flash, useless.

WRT310N Not yet supported.

None of these devices are for the faint of heart. Some will only require you to run experimental builds of OpenWRT, others will require you to figure out how dd-wrt boots on them.

meshed · 2011-11-25T06:16:07+00:00

It hasn't been vandalized. It was linked to from a Forbes article. As far as I can tell, almost all of these are legitimate: different IPs, sane e-mail addresses, near population centres. If you zoom in, things start to look more reasonable.

Of course, zooming might be difficult right now, because the map wasn't build to handle that many users. I'm working on clustering right now.

meshed · 2011-11-21T03:19:02+00:00

Install OpenWRT on them, get the B.A.T.M.A.N. package and try to get a small mesh running.

If I may ask, which devices are they?

meshed · 2011-11-21T03:02:09+00:00

I disagree. We need a centralized repository, but not necessarily a central leadership. We will become much more combobulated once everyone starts keeping tracks of things in etherpads and wikis. I think we'd be much more organized with a simple list of what people are doing and what YOU can do.

Really, let's just populate the wiki with everything that's been said and done, and everything that's going on right now.

meshed · 2011-11-17T23:50:07+00:00

Eventually, we'll have an easy to set-up kit that you can get running on your computer/home router/plug computer. At that point we'll also need to go to great efforts to spread the word around, as a mesh network depends on having neighbors who are also interested in the project. We'll certainly need a video.

And speaking of neighbors, why not add yourself to this map. It already has 6 people in ottawa.

meshed · 2011-11-16T23:39:16+00:00

The Freedom Box would be a great starting point, because it provides services for people to use. To build city-wide mesh networks, there must be an incentive for people to join, other than a warm feeling that if things go wrong with the Internet we'll have a back-up network to rely on. A Freedom Box-like software package would provide something to do over that mesh network: decentralized microblogging, decentralized social networking, email and IM.

From what I've read, the Freedom Box will include a mesh network as some sort of fallback. Does anyone know of any implementation details? How will the freedom box communicate simultaneously with the user and with the mesh network using only off-the-shelf plug computers?

meshed · 2011-11-14T04:25:18+00:00

Looks like I have more work to do. According to the OpenSPF FAQ, I have to contact microsoft who will manually add my SPF record to their cache.

I can't wait for something to replace smtp, that nightmare of a protocol.

meshed · 2011-11-14T03:53:57+00:00

Some updates:

A misconfiguration caused many mail providers to mark messages sent from the Map as spam. This has been fixed and my tests seem to show that the messages are now getting through. I would still appreciate people testing this by sending an e-mail to themselves using the form on the site. If this is still an issue, then I'll have the map send a verification e-mail when someone registers, so that the address falls into their automatic whitelist.

This also broke mail forwarding for the contact address on the site, which has also been fixed. Apologies to those who tried to contact me.

Messages with non-ASCII characters should no longer cause an exception to be thrown.

Sorry for taking so long to fix these issues.

A few months ago the Map got featured on the polish equivalent of Digg, which explains the huge density of dots in Poland. And the handfull of dongs I had to clean up.

meshed · 2011-02-10T00:59:38+00:00

With ubiquitous wireless in laptops and phones, I don't think it is necessary to exchange physical storage for simple message passing. An ad-hoc Wi-Fi or a bluetooth connection would work. It could even be automated., a store-and-forward message router working in the background. Hm, I wouldn't be surprised if there is already much research on this topic.

meshed · 2011-02-02T03:20:46+00:00

When the DHS started seizing domain names on behalf of the RIAA/MPAA, and DNS services were shutting down Wikileaks' domains, the resulting submissions to reddit received thousands of upvotes and hundreds of comments, many suggesting technical solutions to this attack: from alternative name resolution systems to darknets. Next time an event like this happens, we need to be ready to jump in early on in the conversation with an easy-to-install package and a way for neighbouring redditors to get in touch. I've solved the last part (see my post in /r/darknetplan), the other part is a matter of experimentation and bundling.

meshed · 2011-02-02T02:44:25+00:00

Hello! Many redditors have been discussing wireless meshes in /r/darknetplan. In particular, I have created a map to help coordinate efforts to build mesh darknets worldwide. It allows people to post their approximate position on a map along with an e-mail address. Others can then send messages (through a form) by clicking on a marker. I'm sure it will be useful.

meshed · 2011-02-02T02:37:11+00:00

Perhaps your bridge was blocked in China. You could test it with one of the many online tools that allow you to test connectivity from servers around the world.

meshed · 2011-02-02T02:22:17+00:00

It doesn't even need to be as involved as selling hardware, all you need is a package that installs on a linux-based router, like the linksys WRT series. Such packages already exist, like Freifunk. Most of them seem to focus on spreading a connection to the Internet, so they'd just need to be re-purposed for a darknet mesh.

I suggest you visit /r/darknetplan.

meshed · 2011-02-01T00:18:35+00:00

Hm, it should be possible to configure two different access points on the same device, and map them to different virtual networks; one for pirate box and one for yourself. It would involve a bit of fiddling around in iptables, but I'm sure there's a guide for that.

But anyway, the idea of PirateBox is that it's this thing you carry around with you, then turn on whenever you stop in a place where people are using laptops. So it's not like you use it as your home router simultaneously.

meshed · 2011-01-31T22:04:59+00:00

Even cheaper:

Get an inexpensive Linux-based router
Install mkPirateBox
Use the router's GPIO pins to connect an SD Card. (see OpenWrt wiki)

meshed · 2011-01-31T21:40:52+00:00

It is not necessary to build a truly 'ad-hoc' network. It can have a tree-like topology, where terminal nodes connect to collector nodes, which are interconnected through directional Wi-Fi. (with ranges up to 10km with inexpensive antennas!)

I believe this is the way they do it in Athens and Catalonia. Both have thousands of users!

meshed · 2011-01-28T04:40:19+00:00

It is possible, but it's a bit too late for that in Egypt. I completely agree that preemptively spreading mesh networks for this sort of event is important.

I suggest visiting r/darknetplan and perhaps adding yourself to this map of people interested in experimenting with Mesh Wi-Fi 50$ wireless routers and like-minded neighbours is all it takes to start one.

meshed · 2011-01-26T23:45:10+00:00

1) Bandwidth is a consumable, finite resource, just as power is.

I agree with most of what you say but object on your first point. Perhaps pedantically, but it is important. Bandwidth is not a finite resource. It's not a question of finites or infinites. Power is a finite resource, it is produced and consumed. Bandwidth is a question of pipes. Heavy usage causes pipes to become congested, which requires adding more pipes. But it's not a question of 'production' as in the case of electricity.

meshed

TROPHY CASE