Apparently this is something related to using the Bitcoin blockchain to produce a cryptographically verifiable sequence/tree/dag(?) of revisions. Like Git but more crypto-ey.
"V" is a very simple versioned publication system (there's an explanatory link in the article.)
Vpatches are backwards-compatible with ordinary gnupatch. (can simply execute "patch -p0 < nameofpatch" for the sequence.) "V" has nothing directly to do with Bitcoin.
> Pest is a peer-to-peer network protocol intended for IRC-style chat. It is designed for decentralization of control, resistance to natural and artificial interference, and fits-in-head mechanical simplicity -- in that order.
> Pest explicitly rejects the inherently-centralizing concepts of IRC
> An IRC server is typically inhabited by a multitude of casual users and policed by a small group of privileged curators. A Pest station, on the other hand, is under the exclusive control of one person: its operator.
> 1.2.2. Nets Instead of Channels.
> Pest stations organize into nets. A net is formed by a group of station operators with a common interest. An operator who wishes to join a net must peer with at least one of the stations in that net. A broadcast message is sent to every member of a station's net. Nets may easily and organically undergo schismatic splits, or, on the contrary, combine into larger nets, whenever the individual station operators so desire.
This is interesting stuff. The basic model seems kind of elegant and should be relatively straightforward to implement. It also seems like it should be relatively easy to set up a station that "bridges" to other chat platforms like Matrix, IRC, etc.
However I suspect that moderation being nonexistent could pose a problem. Un-peering with somebody is equivalent to blocking them, which is certainly a valid tool for dealing with troublemakers, but it doesn't carry the same weight as being able to centrally found somebody. But I suppose that's part of the deliberate design here.
> 1.2.4. Messages are Authenticable, but not Opposable.
> All Pest messages are authenticable -- a station will only process a message if it carries a valid signature from a peer (though in some cases, the message may not have been authored by that peer.)
> However, they are also repudiatable (i.e. non-opposable) -- since all packet signatures are produced with symmetric keys, the recipient of a message cannot, at any point in time, prove to a third party that he was not in fact the author of that message.
> However, they are also repudiatable (i.e. non-opposable) -- since all packet signatures are produced with symmetric keys, the recipient of a message cannot, at any point in time, prove to a third party that he was not in fact the author of that message.
So basically there is intentionally no way to prevent message forgery by the recipient. Why?
Also tbh. how can I trust a person who in 2021 still hasn't understood that/why HTTPS is important for security even if you only provide read only content with making proper crypto/security decisions?
Author of linked article speaking. (How it ended up here -- I have no idea, I'm rather surprised that it was of interest to more than the 3 people for whom it was written.)
This flame is doubly funny given how the article specifically concerns algorithms for possible decentralized cryptonets.
HTTPSism is deliberately broken on my WWW, to annoy unthinking servants of the PKI Reich.
For the thick: at the start, there is a PGP-signed copy of the text offered. And yes I in fact live and die by my PGP identity. And not Verisign et al's NSA-controlled PKI horror, no.
> at the start, there is a PGP-signed copy of the text offered
Which shows you don't understand the problem.
HTTPS on content only sides is primary about preventing people with tampering with the website in ways which potentially can hurt you from just opening them. The increased trust-ability of the content is important too, but only secondary.
A PGP signed copy helps me to verify the content after I already fully loaded it with a lot of additional overhead.
It doesn't prevent JS injected into your side from being executed, does it prevent a injected http redirect to a fingerprinting site or similar (which e.g. could use non JS fingerprinting or potential non JS based RCE attack vectors, which luckily I haven't heard of in browsers in recent years but are not impossible at all.).
As long a browsers don't check the signature before loading/parsing any content it isn't secure.
EDIT: In general in 2021 using HTTS "doesn't cost you anything" (in the sense of nearly anyone can afford it), neither does it prevent you from still doing what you currently do (standing by PGP(oversimplified)) and being against the by now pretty much not-undoable not-decentralized HTTS infrastructure. But realism is a important part of security.
> HTTPS on content only sides is primary about preventing people with tampering with the website
"people" here specifically excluding Verisign & its successor racketeers, the NSA (plus bananistani national equivalents thereof).
> in ways which potentially can hurt you from just opening them
Running shitware is optional.
> It doesn't prevent JS injected into your side from being executed
The only solution to malicious JS is... to switch off JS. Asking people you don't know to pay the cert tax does not somehow guarantee that their JS is not malicious.
> ... check the signature before loading/parsing any content it isn't secure.
"Secure content" is what you obtained from someone you actually trust and verified with a pubkey you received out of band (ideally -- meatspace). All other content may as well have been authored by evil martians, despite any pretense to the contrary.
> by now pretty much not-undoable not-decentralized HTTS infrastructure
What part of "Where I still have the freedom not to use the Reich's master-keyed pseudocryptographic garbage - I will not use it" is hard to understand?
IMHO it is quite strange that the "HTTPS-everywhere" nonsense isn't immediately understood by everyone for what it is -- simply Google's latest effort to stymie ad-blocking (with the applause of NSA, whose mission today consists largely of efforts to retard the development of actual - i.e. not masterkeyed and not escrowed - crypto.)
“Message forgery by the recipient” is a bit strong.
It's exactly what it allows: The recipient can forge a message they supposedly did receive.
Try explaining "yes it's encrypted and prevents forgery, but not if it's forged by the recipient" to a judge or the media after there was a scandal ;=)
Messages are put into wax-sealed envelopes before being sent over the internet. This evidence is an open envelope with some wax on it.
This digital signature proves the message was written by a party to the communication, but it doesn't prove which one.
Encryption keys can be used to make digital signatures. Anyone with the key for this communication could've made that signature; not just the sender, but the receiver as well.
I find this weird and almost the opposite of what I would want.
I would want a system where I cannot repudiate messages that I sent, but I must repudiate (i.e. cannot claim authorship of) messages that I did not send.
As far as I understand, isn't that how asymmetric encryption typically works? What's the advantage of symmetric encryption in this case?
"Firefox does not trust this site because it uses a certificate that is not valid for www.loper-os.org. The certificate is only valid for the following names: *.nfshost.com, nfshost.com"
The concept of the "SelfChain" confuses me. It sounds like it would fall apart completely for anything except direct messages. If one person goes offline and all other people continue to talk, does that mean the next day my station considers all other speakers "forked"? And I have to unfork all of them? It's not like I can catch up since all messages are stale and discarded after 15 minutes.
Do I allow a hearsay message to fork one of my peers? Can a rouge peer just come in, fork everyone, and leave?
I also don't see much DDOS proofing in this. Best I can find is that you can unpeer people, but since every message is rebroadcasted by everyone, that doesn't seem like much of a protection. Especially since, if the DDOSer has a lot of peers, it seems can be pretty imposible to know who the attacker even is, since there is no singed journal of hops or something.
Only validly-signed (from one of the station's peers) messages move past the decoding stage ("prologue"), and of these only ones with timestamp +/-15min. of station's time; these finally searched for in dedupe queue; and at the end may be rebroadcast, if so marked, to the station's peers strictly.
You can be DOSed, so to speak, by one of your peers, but not DDOSed by a third party -- a reasonable machine can reject signature-failing or replayed-stale packets from multiple NICs at line rate, so long as your WOT is compact (i.e. less than 100 entries). This of course remains to be experimentally tested. Currently there is only an algorithm!
The fact that indirect messages are marked as unverifiable "hearsay" (seemingly regardless of how many peers confirm it), the fact you can only join the network if you peer with someone, and the bounce limit seems to imply that you would want to peer very liberally.
And the trick is that you can't just be DOSed by a peer, you can be DDOSed by the peers of your peers of your peers, as I see it.
Indirect messages must be marked as hearsay, given as (barring the use of asymmetric crypto, which is AFAIK impossible to carry out at Gb+/s line-rate without specialized hardware) there is no way to verify, in any useful sense, their authorship.
The most that can be done to infer authenticity of indirect messages is to see whether such a message rejects the authorship of a known previous message having the same handle -- via the SelfChain. In virtually any case of handle collision, this will occur.
Re: floods -- a station only processes messages from a peer. So in fact in all cases the proximate cause of a flood is identifiable, and you can "UNPEER" and "GAG" him.
Flooding by a peer is annoying, but is not what people normally think of as "DDOS" (normally the term implies a flood of rubbish received directly from unauthenticated third parties.)
How liberally to peer -- is a matter for an individual station operator. Peering with every passing acquaintance has obvious down-sides.
"vs." being an abbreviation for versus carries an entirely different meaning than the intended version.