[GNUnet-developers] [patch] randomized download order

[Igor Wronsky]

Hello all. I noticed that gnunet-download always downloads 
the content blocks in the same order. This might skew the 
global block distribution if downloads are aborted, that is,
allow the first blocks to become more widely distributed 
than the last ones. Also a situation might be imagined where e.g. 
node A comes around to share a file k, 4 other nodes start 
to download k, all in the same order. After some time, 
node A gets enough and goes away before any of them did get
the whole file <sniff>. If the 4 people had been downloading 
in randomized order, they might have been able to reconstruct 
the entire file from each other.

This small patch (against the current CVS) attempts
to remedy the situation by randomizing the download order 
somewhat (tree structure restricts this a little). The 
increase in execution time shouldn't be too expensive.

Comments?


Igor

randomdl.patch
Description: Text document