Re: [GNUnet-developers] question on how to enforce anonymity

[Nagy Ferenc László]

On Tue, Apr 13, 2004 at 06:52:17PM -0500, Christian Grothoff wrote:
> On Tuesday 13 April 2004 17:32, you wrote:
> > On Tue, Apr 13, 2004 at 01:04:45PM -0500, Christian Grothoff wrote:
> > > Your friends can have their own policies (how could you enforce what
> > > someone else is allowed to do?).  About exchanging HELOs, well, you can
> > > obviously not prevent them from doing anything, but the option
> > >
> > > HELOEXCHANGE = YES/NO
> > >
> > > already exists.  Ok, we might want to have something more fine-grained
> > > (to specify which HELOs are ok to be forwarded), but either way you'll
> > > always have to trust your "friends" here.
> >
> > I trust my friends and HELOEXCHANGE = NO looks adequate. I only see a
> > little loss of performance: if my friend forwards my QUERY to an external
> > node with my host key as the return address, then those packets are
> > pointless. But maybe it's easier to live with it than to teach my friend
> > about my other friends.
> 
> Right.  You seem to know the details of the protocol quite well :-).  Now, I  
> think that this should not happen too often anyway, at least not to an extend 
> that it would ultimately matter.
> 
> > Ok, I try to invent a scenario, when all these have a little sense (and I
> > know that the thread starter wanted a completely different thing): Suppose
> > that I live in a country where I can legally share copyrighted material
> > with my close friends, but not with somebody I don't know personally. Then
> > I connect to my friends, my friends connect to their friends, and one of
> > my friends' friends in Canada connect to anybody. This way anybody can
> > download anything while respecting legal rules. (Or next door to.)
> 
> Right, there are certainly plenty of applications where this makes sense, 
> which is why I've added the feature.

If there is demand (I'm not demanding, just talking), maybe nodes can flag
other nodes if they want to hide their presence. If a node is flagged, we
don't forward its HELO messages and we either drop its QUERY or replace the
return address in it. Some possibilities to set flags: a, by config file
b, by placing host keys in a separate directory c, by extending protocol
so this flag is advertised together with HELO messages.

Of course this is voluntary operation, so if the timid node doesn't trust
us, it won't connect to us.

Nagy Ferenc László