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Packet Juggling - Floating Data Storage
Filthmaster writes "I just saw an interesting paper that has been posted to bugtraq, full-disclosure and vulnwatch. It deals with the principles of stealthily using network infrastructure as either short-term or long-term storage. Not sure if I'm ready to implement it, but it makes interesting food for thought." There's also a mirror up.
.. as long as the power stays up..
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
Won't everyone pinging their gigabytes of data back and forth totally screw the net, a la slammer?
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
I expected something about floaties for my SAN. Oh well. *sigh*
would it no longer meet its qualification of being "volitile memory" if the power went down?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
If it were quick enough and timed well enough, could network bounced packets be enough for some really quick swapped out swap space? gig ethernet gets around 1ms to my next machine, and thats 10 times quicker than my hard drive (10ms access time) so if I could store swap in that space, would that work?
I was thinking of tunneling ssh over sms before this, but that sounds just silly now.
Why use your own network when you can..
6seryoeyEe O.ot..>u&6eOyeUWrong loader, giving up...f1Afaef1UDf efPAMSfIr f=PAMSu e }eoACfuuEu1E1OeIr*uu uuAUfayyfAafafayyfaI1UIeS1AOA6Ee PAQuo1AOA6YoIrutEe A1AuoEe O1A AuIr!AOEe A
This would be very interesting with RAID 5.
30% off web hosting. Coupon code "SLASHDOT".
First you give it comms, then unlimited CPU and now distributed memory.
Can Skynet be far behind...
point taken, Lord Bitman. However, the world 'reliable' is given greater prominence by the author:
The following paper explores the possibilities of using certain properties of the Internet or any other large network to create a reliable, volatile distributed data storage of a large capacity.
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
A: Oh, I'm just storing data temporarily.
Seriously, the idea is interesting, but I doubt that many network operators will like the extra network load. It would be interesting to build a SAN in this manner, just for academic's sake ;-)
Oh, and the example with Microsoft's exchange servers made me chuckle. Finally a reliable storage "medium" from Microsoft! Go figure :)
There is a very cyber savvy anime that deals with high level encoding of data into IP... allowing consciousnesses to live in the internet itself.
Serial Experiments Lain
http://www.animetric.com/qrs/selain.html
When our network fileserver fills up (as it does twice a week or so), I start emailing things to myself through the corporate mail server. When the mail server fills up, I start adding to my intranet HTTP pages. When all else fails, I start sending (encrypted) data back to myself via my ISPs external mail servers.
It would of course be far better for the company if they just sprang for some new drives in the fileserver, but engineer and bandwidth costs don't appear as capital expenses, so they are viewed as being effectively "free". Sigh.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
While the authors try to use existing protocols to simulate temporary storage in the Internet, we are working on a scalable, shared storage resource that is open to the community.
We currently have over 20 TB of storage around the world available in the public Logistical Networking Testbed and other groups have another 10-20 TB provisioned in private use testbeds.
In additon to storage, we are also working on providing simple computational services at the storage nodes (work on the data in place while it is stored rather than moving it to computation centers).
For more info, visit the LoCI Lab at http://loci.cs.utk.edu.
Download Linux ISOs in 5 minutes using LoRS Tools available at http://loci.cs.utk.edu
... in which complete computer memories worked like this: those were called mercury delay line memories, in which pressure waves in mercury lines basically held information.
The UNIVAC I had such an 18-channel memory. More information can be found here, here, and here.
These channels could hold a whopping kilobit!
Support a Europe-related section on Slashdot!
Just burn a CD a day and post it to a non-existant address on the other side of the world. That way you can probably keep a terabyte of data int he air without taking any space in your office, and, unlike TCP/IP, you may be able to reuse the wrappers.
Virtually serving coffee
Yes.
1. Imagine a beowulf cluster of hosts sharing their ram via the network, possibly with supernodes acting as RAID-like controllers.
2. Figure out a way to make it "secure" on a public network. Encryption ?
3. ???
4. Profit !
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
of smaller buckets, bigger pipes rather than bigger buckets. Anyway no time to rtfa It is very interesting. What if you could do incremental backups to the network bandwidth and do wider full backups throughout the week? Someone mentioned, what if the power goes down? Any datacenter worth speaking of, should have a backup deisel generator. Would then at least data held over the network here, be unaffected?
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
Someone once said that if you have a truly good idea you don't need to worry about anyone stealing it : you'll have to try very hard to get anyone to listen at all.
Stick Men
Not everyone can benefit, because of side effects of it's parasitic nature.
The amount of storage this system gives in the text would be total available for ALL users of the system. More users, less avaiable storage.
Parasites can do better when there little competition from other parasites, but if the system get's infested, the host it lives of may die. Or someone may develop a cure.
Either way, after a certain threshold, the more popular any system using this gets, the less useful it would be.
Just some random thoughts I had when I was talking about a similar idea with someone.
You do realize, that a letter from Canada to China is good 15 bucks, so you're paying a good 80 for 4GB of storage when you can buy a 40GB HD for 50$????
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
Did anyone else read this as Pocket Juggling?
--Muzz
The use of mail servers (Class B) more adequately meets the term "reliable", but is still dependent on power being available at critical times.
:)
These situations seem to be for those cases where security of data far outweighs the ability to retain it. Check you mail queue. Maybe you have NSA encrypted documents right now
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
It reminds me a lot of the mercury ripple tank storage devices they used to have with _old_ computers.
"Absorbing your worst..."
Wasn't there an old (pre theregister.co.uk) BOFH article where the Bastard tricked his boss into proposing the use of the network as a storage medium?
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
Surface mail is cheaper, and takes longer. ;)
And then power failed on one of the first units.
You could make a shorter loop by posting the letters to yourself, and increase the packet size (DVD). But these are the kind of trivial implementational issues that are always thrown up by late-adopters in the face of a paradigm shift. If your office gets hit by lightning, chances are that your 40GB HD is a gonner, whereas in my system all your data will still be safe, providing the fire brigade let you put up a provisional post box.
Virtually serving coffee
... based around the premise of an 'industry' of 'dataspace', where data is converted into radio waves, and 'flung' out into space to be 'stored', retreived on the other end, and bounced back again, repeatedly, over millions and millions of miles, as a way of getting 'cheap' storage for stuff that you want to have around only on a periodic basis.
I guess I should've made it a 'whitepaper' instead. I got a B, though, that was nice!
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
You've obviously never used Exchange then ?
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
I thought it said pocket juggling, now it makes more sense.
There's never anything new...in electronics lab in college in the 60's I built a delay line memory, which was nothing more than a very large coil of wire and some rather simple circuity that would shove bit's into one end and 'catch' them out the other side and recirculate them. You used timing to specify the addresss and could read or update as the bit came by. Another variation that was commercially used on this used a column of mercury and cycling sound waves...see http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/mak-UNIVAC-I-delay- line.doc
which to my mind refers to:It could just be my mind - just fell down in the bath and hit my head falling over the edge...
|>>?
I recall seeing this mentioned in a hacker "e-zine" article many moons ago. Perhaps someone could dig it up?
Man watching 6 MSCE's around a sun box, looks alot like the opening scene's of 2001:space odyssey...
Didn't the BOFH convince the Boss that you could store data on the network cables, causing him to order quite a few spools of the stuff?
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
I think that was meant to be a joke, i.e. not to be taken seriously.
Whilte it's good to see people exercising their minds like this, it's also good to keep in mind that some things should not be regarded as more than just exercises.
With this particular scheme, the inherent complexity (needing interfaces to all of these common network protocols) and the risks (there must be a billion ways to lose data this way) basically mean that storage according to this scheme would be really high.
Disproportionate storage costs per unit data automatically means no real-world application outside of brain exercising.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
It was 1997 when Simon the BOFH wrote about such a contraption, which won him the IT Idiot Award for Least Intelligent Supervisor.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
"Most of us, the authors of this paper, have attempted to juggle with three or more apples" Try juggling three iMacs (they're fragile ballistic objects, right?) and let's see how your arms feel!
10 Bits= $.25
100 Bits= $.50
110 Bits= $.75
1000 Bits= 1 byte
When I was in college back in the Good Old Days (tm) of the Internet, I had a friend who sometimes stored files "in transit", so to speak, by emailing them to himself with explicit routing in the To address. He would send the message on a long circuit of several machines around the country and he had a script to automatically reforward them once they got back if he didn't save them within a certain period of time. Back in the day you could do this by setting the To address to something like "@hostone.com,@hosttwo.com,me@myhost.com" (see RFC 821 sec 3.6) and since the network and the machines on it were much slower in those days, if you added enough hosts then you could introduce a significant delay and have lots of files stored in transit (actually, on the various mail servers) even though your own disk quota was nearly used.
Explicit routing is long gone, but it is an interesting early manifestation of the same principle: the network is my hard drive.
This reminds me of the scheme to bounce data off a mirror on the moon using lasers. Each bit you send comes back 2-3 seconds later, giving you potentially terabits of storage depending on your laser pulse width and how many frequencies you use.
aQazaQa
Let Google and thousands of news servers archive all your data for you.
I remember that when I was at the University, I explained to someone that with satellites at 37000 km from us, information took a quarter of a second to go there and back to earth. So if you use a 500 Mbps link, you can store 15 MBytes of data in the distance between, on an absolutely zero cost medium, during 0.25 second. And if you were confident enough in the reliability, you could even put a bouncer on earth, which goal would only be to resend the stream to the satellite and keep it looping. You would have 15 Mbytes of free storage with an average access time of 125ms (250ms max). Although absolutely useless, that would be as fun as TCP/IP over pigeon routing :-)
Willy
I will never put a sig.
Much simpler: just post all your stuff on Slashdot. With all the random garbage surrounding it noone will notice anyway.
<storage>095257baf2ba839ec8605869dd3ddbd1</stora ge>
what about loop-connecting an optical cable -- tech it a little and use that as storage? :).
:)
When we're speaking of ideas -- have anyone developed a torrent-style mp3-radio? That would make it cheaper and easier to set up a mp3-radio? Or how about streaming video? -- that would've been cool
How does using a scarce resource (bandwidth) to create an abundant resource (disk space) make any economic sense?
Headline: How to turn gold into copper! News at 11.
Or I could upgrade my internet connection to get the same amount of storage in other locations. In about three months the extra required capacity on the internet connection would have cost me as much as the harddisk. If I buy the harddisk now, in three months I will still have storage without having to keep paying. Besides, the harddisk is going to be more efficient and probably also more reliable.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
I mean, really. If they've filled the disks then they need more space, why on earth are you fucking about in this bizarre way?
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Not any longer!! (unless you're running the bind patch
This is all fine,...
:/
but yet again, it raises the simple question that
egotistical people never ask???
What are the consequences of this?
Imagine an internet paedophile ring using these
techniques to TCP or SMTP packets into world
(loaded with all the condemning data, but...
no evidence to see who did it, OR, even if the
data itself exists.. How will people know it)
I think this is bad science,...
but interesting nonetheless and truthfully
something I have already delved in myself..
We have been developing a very similar algorithm at AT&T labs and actually have a working OC-768 testbed in the proof-of-concept phase. We had to get around the IP ttl limitation by doubling it from 255 to 512. Doing that requires deviating from the RFC and using 9 bits instead of 8 for ttl. This can be acheived by "borrowing" a bit in the IP reserved fields so that the floating packet has a longer life span in the network. Otherwise, we run into the risk of discarded packets and lost data.
...but I just love bringing up the fact that I'd thought up something similar, like, 4 years ago now, and every time my memory's jogged about it here on Slashdot, I like to post about it. Instead of hijacking existing services, however, I did create a new one, where a basically packets were flung from one machine to another (or many) around and around again -- each machine held on to a number of packets, but didn't keep them for too long. All traffic was encrypted, and no machine knew 1) where a packet started and 2) where a packet ended up, it just kept flinging packets around.
The main goal of the service was to create a nice, neat, encrypted, secure messaging system where neither the origin or destination of a particular message could be detected, such that even if a message was intercepted and decoded, you still didn't know where it came from or where it was going. (This was envisioned about 2 days after the early reports of Carnivore.)
One of the nice side effects, however, is that you could use the service to basically store a message "on-the-wire" damn near indefinately, broken apart into tiny packets, distributed more or less randomly to every other participating host, with those hosts having absolutely no clue what it was, who put it there, or who's going to retrieve it.
The bandwidth usage was, in two words, potentially catastrophic. It could really hork a network. I mean, really, REALLY hork a network.
It was kinda cool. God only knows where that paper is today, though -- I removed it from the web about 2 years back when the Justice Department was considering considering such papers, ideas, services, devices as potential aids to terrorism, and fining/imprisoning the bright young minds who come up with such stuff. So, until either our government stops playing the "T" card, our citizens calm down, and/or we eradicate the likes of Hammas, Islamic Jihad, the IRA, the ELF, and many other like groups, I doubt I'll ever make it available again. *shrug*
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
Floating Data Storage. Now they'll HAVE to approve my request for a jacuzzi in the server room!
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I think the term they're using is packet juggling, not pocket juggling. But a hole in a pocket can be great fun and very entertaining.
Secure, Untraceable Internet Communication -- Is it possible?
Scotty did something like this when they found his little ship crashed on a dyson sphere. It wasn't a network, but he "stored" his pattern by having it constantly recycle through the pattern buffer (or something like that). Geordi thought it was ingenious, of course.
There's also a mirror up.
Sneaky bastards!
Michael Gentili
- He's just some guy, you know?
End of the Internet predicted, and all that.
I vote we use the papers' authors as practice bombs.
It's also interesting that way back in the dawn of computing equipment they did use propagation delay as a way of doing storage. Mercury delay lines in particular. Not only that, the people that used them noticed that the tubes made noise and found ways to play tunes by saving the appropriate data. Google "mercury delay lines" and you'll find a few notes about the technology.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
Not everyone can benefit, because of side effects of it's parasitic nature
"If I come back as an animal in my next lifetime, I hope it's some type of parasite, because this is the part where I take it EASY!"
- Jack Handey
-kgj
This is exactly like check kiting, and should be just about as illegal!
Scotty uses this in the TNG episode "Relics" to keep himself alive by being stuck in a transporter doing diagnostic loops for a good number of years (Hey at least it was better than the plothole for Kirk's TNG appearance in Generations!). I always find it amusing when I see sci-fi stuff start showing up in the real world.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
Not a bad idea, but I'm going point out that this wouldn't work unless you were able to tolerate the loss of packets.
IP Networks make no guarantees that a packet will be delivered, and packet losses can occur on even the most underutilized of networks. The only reason that TCP can provide guaranteed transmission is that it holds the packets in a buffer until an ack has been received. If we hold everything in a buffer, we won't gain anything with this scheme.
I suppose that one could use duplication of packets, or better yet, error correcting codes, to make the system tolerant of individual packet losses. However, as others have pointed out, there is always the possibility of a route change, link failure, or a power failure, and it would not be possible to protect against the massive number of packets that would be lost in such a situation.
Yawn! This isn't a new idea. Somebody else mentioned, in the pre-Internet days, that it's possible to bounce a modulated laser beam off the mirrors on the moon. The round-trip time for light is a tad less than 3 seconds; pick your favoriate optical modulation technology and away you go.
--
Put a mirror on Pluto and bounce a 1TB/s comm laser off it for 28PB of storage with 8 hour latency. Hmm.. having the photons orbit a black hole..
Ooh, better yet, build a network of trebuchet-catcher's mitten -pairs and have them juggle 250GB disks! Just watch out for collisions.
I remember all sorts of tricks like that in college. Back in the day when many mail servers with UUCP would only call each other every few hours, one could store lots of data in them. Especially if your network's quota system let you exceed your quota for short periods of time. The best were slow mailers where you could use long bang-paths like somewherefar!somewherelsefar!sun!sono!mayer to explicitly target slow/big servers. We were inspired by an article in the 80s proposing similar with mirrors on the moon.
This is absolutely true. You can actually use all the buffer/cache of all the routers, switches and computers allocate you in the way of the package to store data.
About 4 years ago I did a test transfering approx 50 Mb of data, as an icmp payload, taking a long route (satelite/trans-atlantic route etc).
My main problem with it, even with the cache, translation and bouncing delay, was that I was getting the first packets back by the time I was sending packet #. (My PoC wasn't very efficient.)
I still think it's a cool idea though, just have to make sure that you use Reed-Solomon (or such) so you can reconstruct any dropped packets.
'I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds'
I don't imagine that a Class A (tcp/ip) parasitic computing model would be particularly ideal for sensitive data as the script/prog/implementation would be stored in RAM on the Host running the exploit. If the ram on this box were compromised, it would prove trivial to re-piece together the data via the individual hosts.
I'm a sysadmin in a very large corporation and when we run out of space, I tell management. In fact, I tell them in advance, regularly, that's what capacity planning is all about.
If they decide not to do anything, like let me buy more disk or a bigger file server, I leave the space full and suggest files which might be trimmed or people who are using more space than might be reasonable.
It's their problem, they are the ones with the purse strings and it's their production which is being halted by their stupidity.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Wonder if this was used as the storage unit for Half-Life 2 Source Code......
What about those /tmp directories -- who needs those? We can store data there.
Even disks that are full let you create empty files -- uuencode and store data in empty files as long filenames.
Who uses all that memory these days? Store data in memory, keep a few redundant copies for silly "rebooting" incidents.
Virtual memory is another place ripe for picking. What about screen memory -- no one uses the whole desktop
Couldn't you send data to the speakers, and grab the data back from the microphone?
After the couple in the story presses the button (after lotsa ethical considerations), the owners of the box show up with the money and take the box away. When asked what they will do with the box, they reply "We will give the box to someone you do not know"
I dont know, this sounds like something that, with enough forthough, could work very well.
Of course, that would only work if nobody actually knew about it. The fool published the idea, now no one can do it!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I'll be rich till the end of my days! bonus. *presses the button a few more dozen times*
I went to a lecture by J. W. Forester once where he said that one of the ideas that came up before the invention of core memory was to use long microwave loops as a storage medium. Sounds like bad ideas never fade away.