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InvisibleNet Presents IIP
An anonymous submitter writes: "A new and ever growing project has launched into the alternative
network realm, changing the pace by focusing directly on speech, rather than file sharing. The Invisible Irc Project, a peer
distributed secure and anonymous internet relay chat network has popped up
at some of the recent conventions this past year. The creator, and project leader, known as 0x90, has been seen at
CodeCon 2002 introducing
it to the public, at that time in more of a primitive state, and
today, almost a year later, the software has noticeably been more
usable by the masses. 0x90 just gave a talk at ToorCon 2K2 on designing a robust
& secure Peer-2-Peer framework, and their InvisibleNet site just released
new software
along with a two part interview that
was taken in July. A good read that details the depths of their
project, including the state it is in now, and the future vision of
a privately distributed steganographical crypto-net. I have tried
out the software and it is very easy to set up, and it supports the
freenixes, OS X, and Win32 machines. You can use any irc client
with it seemlessly, and the cryptography is handled transparently
within your "IIP" node. It's GPL so peer review is welcome, as it
also states this on their site. It appears to have a nice community
of users with a range of discussions. So if you have a bit of time
on your hands to engage in some chatting online, give this a try.
It's alternative, creative, and possibly a standard setting step to
securing IRC as we know it."
It's also gross in decimal, as in, a gross (144).
This sig is false.
Social Contract? I don't remember signing any Social Contract!
/me prepares for flamebait ratings.
Is this really such a good idea, keeping in mind the terrorist attacks last year? Bare with me, I do have a point.
I'm one for privacy and also for secure ways of doing things on the internet, BUT, and its a BIG BUT, think of the other uses this could have, especially for terrorists. This sort of thing could give more fuel to the fire for governments to try to crack down on the internet and create more of a big brother state where they are able to monitor everything and encryprion is outlawed.
On the other hand, think about the earlier post today from Chris Tresco, where he says that encryption is only as strong as your weakest link. What if one of the machines along the way was compromised? Could it be used to monitor data and then be analysed to connect the dots so to speak?
None-the-less, I think it's an interesting project and wish them the best of luck.
Resistance to Deliberate Attacks is often strongly related to scalability. Sure, there are other ways to attack systems - find bugs in the code, or do social engineering attacks like posting Scientology documents and Metallica songs and ratting out any identifiable network operators. But attacks on the network's scalability can be really hard to fix, because they abuse things the system _is_ supposed to do rather than things it isn't. Have you looked at what parts of the network are easy to overload with data volume or small-message quantity or CPU-burning public-key crypto calculations or other critical resources?
.
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Oh, also, Invisibility is Cool, huh huh, huh huh, Invisible, yeah cool.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The problem is, that with anonymous people, you don't know just who you're talking to.
Why do you think there's an old 'hacker proverb' of "every third one is a fed"?
Yes, they do still keep their eyes on the "hacker community"; even those who aren't doing anything illegal. Don't take my word for it; use FOIA to request your files--the addresses & instructions you need to do so can easily be located online.
yes, and this extract from the interview seems to confirm
that yours is the 'correct' decoding of the nick -
still like the 'gross' interpretation but...
I've worked in VPN and P2P space for past few years and have been poking around the similar ideas for quite some time.
The basic idea is very simple - you create trusted network of anonymous -proxies- and if node sees the traffic coming from the peer it's just unable to tell if it belongs the peer or some proxied node behind it. Hense the anonymity is built into the infrastructure.
While looking at this, I got as far as putting together formal design document and protocol spec, and passed them around for the "peer review". The common problem everyone pointed out was the fact that this approach will not scale. It might be fine for IRC traffic, but it cannot and should not be applied to bulk data transfers. This is something InvisibleNet still has to realize.
It's good that they have a momentum, which may (or may not) allow them to overcome principal problems of the architecure.
3.243F6A8885A308D313
We have an option implemented called the steady protocol, this is a constant bandwidth mode, and is easily done by replacing the spurt in your node.ref to steady when acting as a relay. We are very familiar with this method, and are working similarly to a DC-Net in the future. Also, the study of onion-routing, and other methods are in consideration. This is a bold project admittedly, and any help is furthur welcome.
Thanx.
0x90
Also, given world wide distribution of nodes, the high improbability of being able to gather and analyze that data (encrypted as such) as well, is rare, so as the network gets bigger, there is a lot of data to analyze, and this is highly unlikely to be able to trivially track.
0x90
Your thoughts on Quantized Blocks of Messages, where they are timed message inputs and are displayed all at once on a channel? Would this be a good method to avoid time delay attacks. Also can you give me your email address. just get our email at the iip site.
THnx.
0x90