From: janke@unixg.ubc.ca
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 05:41:55 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Active Attacks on DC-nets
Message-ID: <m23f319xhv.fsf@clouds.heaven.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



I haven't read the paper on active attacks yet, but here is an easy
example that I thought of, that others might find illuminating:

When there is a round with no messages the server sends garbage to all 
but one of the participants so they think collisions occured. The other 
participant is sent zero so that he or she thinks the channel is open. 
The participants who think colllisions occured are then likely to back
off for a number of rounds, so that if a message is sent it is most likely 
from the participant who wasn't lied to.  

What do people think of the idea of clients signing all input to the
dcnet and the server signing all output and keeping logs so that it could 
be verified afterward (after the damage was done! :) ) whether or not
everything
was carried out properly or not. With Schnorr signatures and precomputation
the clients could still be reasonably quick. The server will have to
do alot of work, but the signature verifications could be done in parallel
on a multiprocessor computer. Verification of the proceedings would also be
long, but it could be done off-line.

-- 
Leonard Janke
(pgp key id 0xF4118611)