[Nix-dev] Google Summer of Code 2015

[stewart mackenzie]

On Thu, Feb 5, 2015 at 5:10 PM, Michael Raskin <7c6f434c at mail.ru> wrote:

>>* you can't make a viable security model - secure pipes vs secure
>>data. (spam still gets through, network is blind to the data)
>
> You cannot solve spam problem just by switching protocols without
> breaking a ton of communication models…

NDN is a TCP/IP overlay. Now on the receiving end: You only accept
traffic based on the certs you have and are looking for.
Secondly as it's a pull model, spammers cannot push their spam into you inbox.

Yes, I argue, you can kill spam with a switch to a pulling named based protocol.

>>* huge plumbing operation to map data names to data locations. ( thus
>>depending on DNS and all the security issues that come with it -
>>Maintaining a global network of unique identities is an expensive
>>job.)
>
> NDN route search is quite expensive either from this or the previous
> point of view.

Flooding is dirt cheap in this NDN. You can bomb the hell out of it.

> The problem with points is that NDN requires all intermediate routers to
> cache your content for the entire time of round-trip.

Not a huge problem, buffers were introduced into telephony networks
and folks declared heresy.
The NDN buffer is a Least Recently Used buffer. Meh no big deal.

> So they are likely to a) break systems with slow endpoint links, because
> unlike current model (where they relay packets without caring whether
> they are in the same session) routers may have timeouts lower than
> the round-trip time; and b) only transfer your content if your signature
> matches the certified list.

NDN is a TCP/IP overlay.

Each node maintains it's own certified list. Yes I only want the data
I requested to come to me.
Not Spammer Sam's Spam.

>>What are we doing? Disseminating binary chunks over a point-to-point
>>network. Hence Hydra is sitting at a point in this network and we all
>>have trust. Whereas in reality over this type of point-to-point
>>network there really is no security. So by default we trust the
>>custodians of Hydra. What if those custodians could trust others and
>>allow them to contribute to this build pool and we all trust that
>>those binaries are safe. It's terribly hard to trust another if we use
>>a point-to-point network and if we do it'll be complex to achieve.
>>This can be negated by using NDN which has provenance built into the
>>protocol unlike using raw TCP/IP.
>>
>>This approach is orders of magnitude simpler than using IPFS.io.
>
> It also requires a ton of storage on all the routers. And makes it much
> easier to do _and_ easier to justify to filter some content.

Immutability with temporal bindings requires a large storage system in
many cases. But with an LRU it isn't a problem.
Besides, each Nix node has a massive /nix/store which is in essence
could be the NDN LRU buffer.
No big deal. Also, storage is cheap! Bandwidth is expensive! Every
node may adjust the size of their LRU buffer.

Indeed, one could completely refactor the /nix/store to be a LRU, that
way applications that were installed but aren't used that much get
wiped.
Though if there is a need to execute it, it'll transparently go over
the network and pull down the binary again. No need for
nix-collect-garbage.