Comment by blacklion
1 month ago
Does anybody know how good routing in this Project protected from malicious actors, or simply badly configured nodes?
As far as I know, most mesh routing protocols is very sensitive to rogue nodes, even if it is misconfiguration and not malicious intent...
With current size of the network, it's probably managed by sending messages to operators chat “Hey, IP a.b.c.d is doing that again”.
Remember that Fido and Usenet relied on independent server admins voluntary enforcing the rules for global groups (and allowed the alternative sister hierarchies or local appendices with different rules). It is possible to give more power to local decision maker, and share the global ideas.
Link establishment mentions validation of the circle by the intermediate hops. I suppose that someone who is sending a lot of packets without participation from the other side can be put into exponentially worse and worse queues. Or maybe not. There's a lot of things to test.
I mean, this is not a solution if we want winder adoption.
I was FIDONet node (and even hub) sysop, and I remember well, that FIDO was rigid hierarchical structure — you have your NC, and NC can discommunicate any node in his network. Yes, it was elected position, but after elections it was mostly dictatorship.
It doesn't seems like «Fully self-configuring multi-hop routing over heterogeneous carriers» advertised by this project, rather opposite.
> Does anybody know how good routing in this Project protected from malicious actors, or simply badly configured nodes?
Reticulum requires you to manually define your uplinks, including remote servers. If this remote server is blackholing your traffic, you are SOL.
If you define multiple remote servers, then you may be in luck iff your destination is advertising its route on a path (chain of servers) that has no such hostile nodes.
So, looks like no «Fully self-configuring multi-hop routing over heterogeneous carriers».