On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 2:38 AM, Fabio Pietrosanti (naif) <li...@infosecurity.ch> wrote: > Hi all, > > 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".
Basically, there are some open unsolved questions on how to do it securely and efficiently. It'd be cool to solve them -- and it looks like the research community could be making progress -- but I don't think I'd want to consider it solved yet. There's some research on this. Here are a few papers to start with, but anybody who's serious about this should chase through their references, and then read other works by the same authors and by authors of related systems and attacks. I think the Salsa paper was particularly well written, and explains a lot of the design decisions you need to make in a p2p anonymity network: http://freehaven.net/anonbib/#Salsa There _are_ published attacks against the system, though. You might want to stop here and see whether you can think of them before you go on. Then I'd read: http://freehaven.net/anonbib/#ccs10-lookup It's a paper that describes attacks against a couple of other previously existing distributed directory designs. Its "related work" section references some more p2p anonymity network designs, and the known attacks against them. The approach of http://freehaven.net/anonbib/#usenix11-pirtor provides an alternate approach for the scalability issue, but leaves the centralized trust issue alone. > 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. > > The question is: > - How much "custom data" a Tor Relay can write in cached-descriptors, by > running a Tor Relay? > > In particular i noticed the following entries as valuable to store > custom-data without breaking other Tor relay functionalities: > > - router > - contact Sure, but why would you ever do that? dir-spec.txt explicitly requires everything that handles router descriptors to allow unrecognized fields and pass them unchanged. -- Nick _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
