Re: [dtn-security] How do you feel about Bonjour/Avahi?

["Graham Keellings (Leonix Solutions Pte Ltd)" <[e-mail]>]

Kamal Srinivasan wrote:
> Graham,
> Our research group @ Univ. of Wisconsin have been working on Anonymous
> communication and Key Management in DTN.
>   
There is a whole Venn-digram of terminology overlap here. Althogu I 
mention DTN, ad-hoc is also a defining phrase for me - which means that 
I can't have a dedicated node as a DNS or key server, since talking out 
hat node makes my network useless.


> Short ans: Our perspective is...it boils down as to how paranoid the app.
> developer over DTN is with security.  
As paranoid as possible, in my case - military grade or more - but of 
course there is a trade-off in terms of time & resources needed to add 
this security


> This really drives where the ACL policies reside in the stack.
>
>   
All over, I think ...

> A not so short ans:
>
> In DTNs, if the connectivity is sparse enough you want to exploit as many
> opportunities as you could. 
That seems to imply an open and trusting network, whereas I am thinking 
of a closed and mistrusting one.

> In such scenarios it would benefit from blaring
> out than hard coding and relying on meeting the hard coded IP devices.  This
> becomes a serious concern when you have unplanned mobility scenarios, where
> you know lesser about the network. So it really depends on what class of DTN
> you are looking into.
>   
"Secure" whatever that means - enough to satisfy banking, the military, 
etc - closed and suspicious, if not paranoid.  But I think we are 
missing an overall discussion of this sort f thing - maybe even just a 
table - showing the trade off between how much security you want and 
what it will cost you.

> If you were to blare out and have approp. policies in place at the BP layer,
> that can be controlled by the app. then you could blare out and still be
> secure. Even if you were not to broadcast, many underlying comm. methods
> would in common scenarios (for ex. in 802.11).
But there are many layers of worry - even bog-standard DOS attacks could 
give grief to my network.

>  We tried to develop an
> anonymous communication sub-layer on top of the sensor nodes (motes), but
> the underlying layers were revealing enough entropy of information.
>
> The above two observations, led us to think of designs that would let the
> user control broadcast, but enable such comm. if the developer thinks it
> would benefit for them to use such blaring for their app.
>
> thanks,
> kamal
>   
Thanks _very_ much for taking the time to send such a long and well 
formulated answer.

/graham


>
> On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 10:13 PM, Graham Keellings (Leonix Solutions Pte Ltd)
> <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>   
>> From a security standpoint?
>>
>> How secure is it to have all of my nodes blaring "here I am, bad guys, come
>> and try to connect to me"?
>>
>> Would I be safer just using hard coded IP address?
>>
>> Thanks in advance for any opinions.
>>
>> ~graham();
>>
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>>     
>
>   


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