Thinking of Private Citizen P2P Mesh Networking as Tier Zero #1015
Replies: 1 comment 7 replies
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once its large scale, it is only a matter of time before its riddled with vulns and any script kiddie or government can perform a mitm attack between you and other connected nodes thereby leaking metadata. the best option at the moment is being small and keeping it simple. |
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the interfaces themselves aren't encrypted, so goverments/ISPs could filter certain packets, which could, for example, block some specific announces. |
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Enable IFAC, and there is nothing to filter on. The entire packet bitstream is masked per-packet with another bitstream derived from the IFAC credentials and the packet itself. Only one bit will be consistent in an entire packet, and that is the IFAC header flag. Everything else is gibberish. That's impossible to do any filtering on, since that bit is most likely set in all kinds of other protocols and situations, and filtering on that bit would break everything. |
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the problem with IFAC is that it uses symmetric encryption, so it can't really be used for public interfaces. what we would need is asymmetrical encryption on the interfaces, like using TLS(or something similar but with Reticulum identities) and by passing the certificate(or identity) in the interface configuration. |
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Reticulum itself uses asymmetric encryption. The job of IFAC is not to add a layer of encryption, but one of primarily authentication and secondly bitstream obfuscation. Apart from that, Auto-IFAC based on verified transport node identity key-exchange is coming in one of the next versions. This has been in the pipeline for two years or something, but haven't gotten to that particular one yet. |
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yeah auto-IFAC should solve the problem(as long as the transport node identity can be verified from the interface configuration). |
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I guess this might be a bit long-winded so bear with me...
We have governments and corporations running the Internet. In theory those entities serve the people of the world. Governments should be beholden to their citizens and only acting in their best interest. Corporations should be beholden to their shareholders and employees.
As we know, that doesn't always (usually?) work out very well. People collectively have the power to change those structures entirely or ideally just change the operating parameters such that those entities actually serve for the benefit of the people of the world and Earth's ecosystems.
Unfortunately, collective action also almost always breaks down. People get easily divided, distracted, placated, killed, etc. Part of why those outcomes are so common is that actually organizing is hard. The playbook for manipulating people to prevent them from effectively - and ideally peacefully - organizing involves; subtly (and sometimes overtly) interrupting communications, giving people cheap meaningless entertainment, corrupting real narratives/discourse with similar but false content (straw men, distractions, etc), the list goes on...
Part of the reason those things work so well is that the channels that people could use to organize and owned and operated by the entities that people might wish to organize against.
As the title of Mark's talk so poignantly puts it, Reticulum (or another encrypted autocratic mesh technology) could be the network for the people. Having a layer that is outside government and corporate control and actually run by people, could be a key part of giving people the ability to act more collectively to reform the run-away power structures of the world.
In some software engineering cultures there's the idea of infrastructure tiers. Ideally, you build a bunch of simple building blocks and use those to power more and more abstract targeted functionality. Some of those building blocks are more foundational than others because they provide key primitives like bulk data storage or super fast key value stores, etc. The most foundational blocks are the ones that underpin and allow you to bootstrap all the others. These might be things like core networking functionality or some identity management concepts. It is sometimes helpful to think of the layers as tiers where the lowest numbered tiers have the fewest dependencies and ideally have the highest availability (in the ways that count).
So, I'm proposing that the tier zero for the worlds "social technological infrastructure" might be a world-spanning mesh network that is run by private citizens.
We don't need to rebuild everything that currently runs on the Internet such that it can run on that mesh network since the other networks we have today can/will still exist. We just need the core pieces that allow that mesh network to serve that tier zero function of allowing people to coordinate and benignly disrupt the broken power structures that exist today.
Obviously, none of this is super novel thought, just a synthesis of why we shouldn't get distracted trying to "port everything" to Reticulum.
Cheers,
Symbioquine
P.S. Here I am writing these subversive things on the Internet - the irony...
P.P.S. No computer aides for writing other than spellcheck, in case anyone was wondering.
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