[Freedombox-discuss] Establishing Communicationbetween Freedomboxes

[bertagaz at ptitcanardnoir.org]

On Thu, Jul 07, 2011 at 06:43:06PM +0000, Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 5:51 PM, Daniel Kahn Gillmor
> <dkg at fifthhorseman.net>wrote:
> 
> >
> > OpenPGP keyservers act as a gossiping cloud -- no one keyserver is "the
> > most up-to-date" at any point.  The only way that they're centralized is
> > that we currently access them through DNS.  Indeed, the worst problems
> > we've had with the global keyserver network recently stem from DNS
> > centralization (the sks-keyservers.net DNS zone became unresponsive
> > while its maintainer was afk), *not* keyserver centralization.
> >
> 
> Most of what you said about DNS was true - given a very powerful adversary
> and naive use of the DNS system: if all dissidents register as
> person.dissident.org, they are trivially attacked.
> 
> However, if 100 dissidents use 10000 different TLDs from 1000 different DNS
> providers, shared with millions of legitimate users who would complain if
> things broke - then things become quite different.  All those high-profile
> choke-points you pointed out are recognized and well understood, and well
> defended as well.  They can be compromised, but it requires a powerful
> adversary and would be global, politically charged news the moment it
> happened. I suspect a great many countries would react quite badly if the
> root started directly interfering with country TLDs.  DNS is distributed in
> more ways than just the protocol.

The kind of "compromise"  would probably mainly be to request the removal
of a subdomain, certainly not a country TLD, so that won't probably be
that much on top of the newspapers.

And to be fair, I guess we are talking of 100 dissident running 100
domains used by 10000 dissidents, which is far less resilient. 

> By contrast, I am guessing (just guessing!) that the keyserver network could
> probably be DDOS'ed off the map by a moderately sized botnet.  And it would
> be gossip-section news, not the front page of the New York Times.  Boosting
> it to support the load of millions of FreedomBoxes' traffic, in addition to
> hardening it against malicious attacks is certainly possible, but I doubt
> it's trivial.

I don't think a moderately sized botnet is able to DDOS the sks keyserver
pool that easily, there is quite a load of servers running in different
networks.  If the freedombox project intend to use this service, first the
number of keys it would add to the WOT would increase progressively, the
keyserver peers should be able to handle it (it already manages more than
2 billions of keys), and second, the freedombox network should certainly
participate to this pool. So freedombox owners should be able to easily
run a new peer on their box.

bert.