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NSF Grants for Decentralized Infrastructure Research
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)."
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.
The /. effect!
s200.org - visit it (me), love it (me).
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
"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!
Wasn't that the goal of the ARPANET project that led to the Internet in the first place? I guess it didn't work.
It's Slashdot's evil twin... SlashNOT
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
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
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
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.
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.