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)."

I smell lawsuit

[Crazieeman]

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.

Another Slow News Day

[billstr78]

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

NOTE to Mods: DifferentTitle != DifferentStory

Centralized Points of Vulnerability

[m0rph3us0]

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

Completely wrong

[Sanity]

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 [freenetproject.org] 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.