Re: Bruce Schneier's Proposal to dedicate November meeting to saving the Internet from the NSA

[Adam Novak <[e-mail]>]

You're right that a flat mesh is not the best topology for
long-distance communication, especially with current routing
protocols, which require things like global lists of all routeable
prefixes.

On the protocol front, I suggest that the IETF develop routing
protocols that can work well in a flat mesh topology. Parallelizing
traffic streams over many available routes, so it all doesn't try to
take the shortest path, would appear to be a particularly important
feature, as would preventing all of a node's links from being swamped
by through traffic that other nodes want it to route.

The problem with long-distance traffic over flat mesh networks is less
with throughput (if everything isn't taking the shortest path) than
with the latencies involved in sending traffic over a very large
number of hops. I think the solution there is to send traffic that's
leaving your local area over the existing (tapable) long-distance
infrastructure. The idea is to make tapping expensive, not impossible.

There's also the point to be made that current traffic patterns depend
to a significant extent on current Internet architectural decisions.
If everyone had a gigabit connection to their neighbors, but only a 10
megabit uplink to route long-distance traffic over, they might find a
use for all that extra local bandwidth.

On Fri, Sep 6, 2013 at 7:22 AM, Noel Chiappa <[e-mail]> wrote:
>     > One way to frustrate this sort of dragnet surveillance would be to
>     > reduce centralization in the Internet's architecture.
>     > ...
>     > [If] The IETF focused on developing protocols (and reserving the
>     > necessary network numbers) to facilitate direct network peering between
>     > private individuals, it could make it much more expensive to mount
>     > large-scale traffic interception attacks.
>
> I'm not sure this is viable (although it's an interesting concept).
>
> With our current routing tools, switching to a flat mesh, as opposed to the
> current fairly-structured system, would require enormous amounts of
> configuration/etc work on the part of smaller entities.
>
> Also, traffic patterns being what they are (e.g. most of my traffic goes
> quite a distance, and hardly any to things close by), everyone would wind up
> handling a lot of 'through' traffic - orders of magnitude more than their
> current traffic load.
>
>         Noel