[Blocks-development] Block Routing

[Blat F. <pet...@ho...>]

[snip snip]
>I want to remove the routes and replace them with "next-hop-to" routes.

>Let us pretend that my current BLOCKS server has a route table that looks
>like this (for some file.zip):
>
>  file.zip        A H E P
>
>This means that my server can get file.zip by sending a request to server 
>A, which sends its request to server H, which sends its request to server 
>E,which sends its request to server P. (Am I correct? I thought this was 
>how it worked).

Yep, you got it.

However, the blocks server is only interested in two things...
the immediately adjacent host to route to, and the length of
the current route.

so, file.zip AHEP => file.zip node=A hops=4

Now, we do need to have a list of routing tokens so that
node A knows where to send the request to once the local
node has sent it to A, but this doesnt mean we need to
leak information about the actual route.

Nodes are free to write any token they want that identifies
an immediate node. The current Blocks implmentation uses
A,B,C,... this and A always maps to node0, B=>node1, etc, but it
doesnt have to be that way.

If the server used a more complex way of creating a
token to node mapping this could ensure routing information
was not leaked for statistical analysis. For instance,
we could encrypt the token with a secret server key and
the advert ID (each advert has a unique 128bit ID).

This creates a problem with the advert database though. When
a node disconnects form a server the server broadcasts a
disconnection notice to all connected nodes, which then
rebroadcast the notice throughout the blocknet. The routing
information from this disconnection notice is used to
exclude newly invalidated routes from searches... for instance...


If we have a local list fo adverts that says...

file.zip AHEP
file.zip AHC
file.zip BDEF
file.zip AHL

if node H breaks connection with node A, then this server will
receive a message which says 'disconnect route AH'. The next
search for file.zip will return only...

file.zip BDEF

we cant do this if we dont have constant routing tokens.

If we dropped this requirement we can get complete routing
anonimity at the expense of a lot of broken downloads. Of
course we could move to a searching rather than advertising
model, or send messages to validate search results, but these
would increase traffic considerably.

Good point for discussio tho. Any ideas?

ttfn

PG.

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