Replying late to this one, since it seems not to appear in the recap, I
Post by ianG1. Anonymous participation is the idea that you can participate in a
distributed system without revealing that to third parties, or at
least to third parties that you do not trust. Think of the structure
of underground networks, where members only communicate with people
they really trust, because every contact that you don't know about
could work for the Gestapo, or the KGB, or the RIAA. This implies
serious restrictions on the topology of the graph, which means
different message routing protocols than classic DHT like Kademlia. It
also require secure protocols to add/remove contacts, or to
connect/reconnect to the graph. Freenet's "dark net" does lots of
that, and the question is, what would it take to make it mainstream?
-- Christian Huitema, also mentioned by Michael Rogers
2. Hidden rendezvous is the idea of enabling something like Skype on
a DHT, but hiding who communicates with whom. Suppose that I connect
to the network anonymously, e.g. using a public Wi-Fi access point,
and that you do the same. How do we find each other without revealing
our location to the NSA and its peers? One potential solution is that
we agree on a secret and derive from it a series of random numbers,
say hash(secret, time-of-day, my-name). Then use that as a key to
publish an IP address in the DHT. A bit clumsy, of course. Can you do
better?
-- Christian Huitema
3. Adversary Model and Incentives.
I think the standard for most decentralized systems including DHT's
and consensus networks is in the "honest" vs "Byzantine" model, with
no regards to incentives. I think the incentive model is a recent
thing since Bitcoin, and it isn't well accepted.
In the incentive model, you might consider three groups of actors.
"Honest", "rational", and "byzantine". The rational my diverge from
the prescribed protocol for self gain, but the honest deviate.
-- Jae Kwon
I wonder what the standard adversary model is for DHTs, and what
happens when some significant fraction of participants are malicious.
-- Greg Troxel
Dealing with Sybil Attack and Eclipse attack (Many corrupt nodes
choosing DHT identities close to some value).
-- real, Micheal Rogers
Creating a rigorous adversarial model for DHTs. (I think that we still
don't have one. Most articles on this subject resort to
experimentation because they can't prove correctness).
-- real
4. Practical limits.
Running a DHT despite the NAT problems. (While many present
non-elegant technical ideas to route around NATs, there might be a
nice theoretical solution).
-- real.
Navigation using Virtual DHTs (Like done in Cjdns. I think nobody
really knows to prove why it works, and whether it is going to scale).
-- real.
5. Applications.
Go back to square one and ask what other pointer-based data structures
would lend themselves to distributed implementation...
-- Micheal Rogers
For example, IPFS, essentially a singly-rooted git tree distributed
via bittorrent. Something that this makes possible, is everyone
publishing trees and software intelligently combining those. ... My
idea is a piece of data is available through many paths. For example,
I want .../book/by/Frederik Pohl/Gateway/ and
.../book/award/Hugo/1978/winner/ to point to the same location.
Navigation could be, in part, winnowing of possible completion paths.
It could be coupled with a signing system that allows individuals or
organizations to authoritatively publish nodes. So, different groups
could curate different subtrees. All of these are then conglomerated
so the ideal content is retrieved when a user requests something.
-- Will Holcomb
Post by ianGRequest for comments: what are the open topics in DHTs?
I'm asking on behalf of a 4th year CS student preparing to do the final
year project; with possible extension into Masters. Having worked with
DHTs, the bug appears to have struck...
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