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NSF Grants for Decentralized Infrastructure Research

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the routing-around-trouble dept.

billbaggins writes "The NSF has given a grant to the IRIS project to research something called Distributed Hash Tables as a tool for creating networks that don't have "centralized points of vulnerability". The chief purpose seems to be to stop DoS attacks, intentional or otherwise. Check out their press release (text or Word format) and also the news coverage (CNN and NYTimes, among others)."

24 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. REPEAT by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/09/25/171322 4&mode=thread&tid=95

  2. Wow... by Kaz+Riprock · · Score: 2

    I guess they're more worried about Votester than we thought!

    --
    Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
  3. I smell lawsuit by Crazieeman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The RIAA won't stand for this. They want the power to DoS and are pushing legislation to make it legal for them. So this will probably be in violation of the DMCA somehow. They'll get their bloodsuc- I mean lawyers right on it.

  4. But can it help against the world's worst DoS? by Komrade+S. · · Score: 5, Funny

    The /. effect!

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    s200.org - visit it (me), love it (me).

  5. P2P platform to build upon. by chris_7d0h · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Hmm. It seems this could be used to cut down on the time spent doing nitty-gritty stuff on each P2P project. "Gnutella like" projects might in the future spend more time doing GUI clients instead of implementing P2P specifications and protocols.

    It will be interesting to see which areas are going to be covered. I guess a way of identification will be included, so the "traditional" P2P projects will probably have to spend some time counter the identification stuff as well.

    --
    In a society that believes in nothing, fear becomes the only agenda ~ Bill Durodié
  6. Or... by jpt.d · · Score: 4, Funny

    "The Non-Slashdot-Fund has dumped a load of money to the IReallyIsn'tSlashdot project to research an anti-slashdot technology called Distributed Hash Tables as a tool for creating networks that are involnerable to slashdots. The chief purpose seems to be to stop Death-of-you-by-Slashdot attacks, from front page or otherwise."

    --
    What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
  7. Hash Tables by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny


    Well last time I was in Amsterdam they had these "Distributed Hash Tables". After about 2 hours I was feeling very decentralized.

  8. This is distributed implementation by chris_7d0h · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Funny thing, last few years people have been calling client/server systems distributed systems. For me they are not distributed as the architect has simply decided to draw a line some where between the datafocused stuff (the provider) and the end user interface fluff (the consumer) and separated the logic into two components (often on separate nodes) The relationship on a conceptual level is always 1..* where many identical consumers use one and the same provider. For me distributed is P2P where a node can both provide and consume data centered services, rather than simply relying on others provide or consume (file-swapping p2p and the SETI apps are good examples).
    Anyway, that's my immediate reflection.

    --
    In a society that believes in nothing, fear becomes the only agenda ~ Bill Durodié
  9. Just a thought... by mmoncur · · Score: 3, Informative
    a tool for creating networks that don't have "centralized points of vulnerability". The chief purpose seems to be to stop DoS attacks, intentional or otherwise.

    Wasn't that the goal of the ARPANET project that led to the Internet in the first place? I guess it didn't work.

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  10. Freenet? by E1ven · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Can anyone explain to me how this is different from Freenet?

    Freenet has a Decentralized Architecture, which is specifically designed to resist DOS attacks, by making each client that views the page into a possible server..

    With freenet, any DDOS attempt would actually make the content MORE accessable, as it spread it to more and more nodes..

    --
    Colin Davis
    1. Re:Freenet? by T4D · · Score: 2, Informative

      The primary goal of Freenet is anonymity. This means that there are some limitations/restrictions placed on the design. The IRIS project has some of the goals as Freenet, but they are not constrained by the additional goal of maintaining absolute anonymity. Without the need to maintain anonymity, they can focus on performance and scalability. They don't need to work about hiding the identity of the author and readers. Freenet is a great project and I hope that they can achieve all their goals. But, their project will never produce a general purpose distributed data storage solution. However, it looks like IRIS and related projects like Cord and CFS will do just that.

  11. very. by jon_c · · Score: 2, Informative

    god this got modded up? i swear, all someone has to do is mention freenet on slasdot, sigh..

    It's not like freenet. freenet searches work just like gnutella, randomly. it's a completely retarded way to organize a network. A distributed hash table like Circle solves this by organizing the network in a logical, storable and efficient way.

    Basically compare a binary search vs. a random search, where the random search is like O(n) except you may just miss something.

    -Jon

    --
    this is my sig.
  12. Another Slow News Day by billstr78 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Becuase this story was posted on Wednesday already. Not only that, but it was the very last story on the topic of the "Internet". Either the mods have short memory loss, or they did not bother to look at the first posting which mentioned the IRIS grant as well.

    NOTE to Mods: DifferentTitle != DifferentStory

  13. Centralized Points of Vulnerability by m0rph3us0 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    All networks have some centralized point of vulnerability. I really fail to see how distributed hash tables will reduce the vulnerability. The internet is probably the most decentralized network in the world, and even it has very vulnerable points. Someone attacking the internet would have a hard time taking it down, completely. However taking it down to a point of general unusability is within feasability given the current situtation and architechure. Today's internet has some very vulnerable points, namely the clients. A worm written in java that abused multiple platform security hole could easily render the internet unusable. I really fail to see how any sort of research is going to solve this problem. A better approach IMHO would be to
    1) elminate completely the use of plaintext protocols
    2)Start using our CPU's to the fullest using the computer to gaurd against software failure. One easy step would be to eliminate decrementing stacks. It's alot hard to overflow into a a memory space behind you then ahead of you.

    Just my 2 cents

    1. Re:Centralized Points of Vulnerability by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 2

      Today's internet has some very vulnerable points, namely the clients.

      That is the upside of technologies like DRM. Hardening the clients with DRM and use of DHT would make the internet a lot more robust.

  14. Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) in P2P... by gojomo · · Score: 5, Informative
    DHTs are also the key to the next generation of efficient, centerless P2P file-sharing.

    Two well-known academic DHT projects are Chord and Kademlia.

    Kademlia is the basis for VarVar and EDonkey's successor, Overnet. There's an experimental effort to add a Chord-style query routing option to Gnutella, to find exact files over the whole network with far less traffic.

  15. Completely wrong by Sanity · · Score: 4, Insightful
    You are sooooooo wrong, and it is you that have been modded up unjustly, since you clearly don't know what you are talking about.

    Freenet searches do not work like Gnutella, as you would know if you knew anything about Freenet.

    Freenet's search has, through multiple independent simulation-based studies (cited in the link I give above), been demonstrated to have logarithmic scalability, not the linear scalability you claim.

    To inject some facts into this conversation - Freenet isn't exactly the same as a distributed hashtable, as it doesn't guarantee retrievability of information, but this is probably an inevitable consequence of achieving Freenet's goals, and Freenet's developers aren't shy about it.

    The claims you have made about Freenet are total FUD.

    1. Re:Completely wrong by Patrick · · Score: 2
      Freenet's search has, through multiple independent simulation-based studies (cited in the link I give above), been demonstrated to have logarithmic scalability, not the linear scalability you claim.

      The very paper you links to shows that median request path length is N^0.28. Logarithmic, that's not.

      Freenet has probabilistic, polynomial-time lookup and unbounded routing table size. Chord-like DHTs have deterministic, logarithmic-time lookup and logarithmic routing table size. Anonymity is nice, but it's costly.

      Freenet's worst-case performance -- i.e., when its routing table state is cold -- is O(N). Just like Gnutella. Chord's worst-case performance is still logarithmic.

      --Patrick

    2. Re:Completely wrong by Sanity · · Score: 2
      The very paper you links to shows that median request path length is N^0.28. Logarithmic, that's not.
      The important thing is that it is sub-linear.
      Freenet has probabilistic, polynomial-time lookup and unbounded routing table size.
      Lookup of what? The routing table size is bounded.
      Freenet's worst-case performance -- i.e., when its routing table state is cold -- is O(N)
      You are using confused terminology. "Freenet" doesn't have a routing table, the individual participant nodes do.
      Chord's worst-case performance is still logarithmic.
      This worst case assumes that nodes in the Chord network don't fail, but given that nodes in any P2P network are prone to failure, this really isn't a worst-case at-all.
  16. I can by Sanity · · Score: 2
    While Freenet achieves many of these goals, there are at least two differences between Freenet and what most people would expect of a distributed hashtable:
    1. Freenet doesn't guarantee retrievability of information
    2. Freenet does its best to protect the anonymity of its users
  17. Attacks on Distributed Hash Tables by Foresto · · Score: 2, Informative

    A quick Google search reveals these tidbits on DHT vulnerabilities:

    Security Considerations for Peer-to-Peer Distributed Hash Tables
    Achilles Heel of the DHT
  18. So many DHTs, so little time.... by wuchang · · Score: 2, Informative

    All the major DHT groups are involved. I wonder which DHT they're going to use.....

    Rice: Pastry (n-Hypercube)
    MIT: Chord (Ring-based)
    Berkeley: Tapestry
    ICSI: CAN (Mesh-based)

    1. Re:So many DHTs, so little time.... by angio · · Score: 2

      > I wonder which DHT they'll use

      The nice thing about DHTs is that the interface is nearly identical on all of the platforms: Given a key, find the associated object. (And insert, of course). Most of the DHT teams are already working together to create a common interface so that they can easily be evaluated against each other. It's likely that the higher-level results from IRIS will be DHT agnostic. Some of the lower-level things (like making the DHTs themselves more resilient) will probably be done using each group's own DHT.

      (Disclaimer: While I work in one of the groups that's participating in iris, these are only my guesses, not any kind of official word).

  19. Political vulnerability by XNormal · · Score: 2

    This kind of system may be more resistant to technical problems like DoS, but I think that it's much more important for it to be resistant to political problems.

    No, I am not talking about legal problems like court orders. If the system as any central point there is the problem of who gets to control it. With no center it will be much easier for everyone to agree on the protocol without endless politicking.

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