NAT Traversal & Bootstrapping

[polpolrene]

Woow, that’s a lot of work you’ve put in it. Respect for that. But I keep saying:

@yonam_nous

It is possible for an ISP to get between a new user and all bootstrapping nodes that the ISP knows about.

yes, they can block the outgoing connection to these bootstraps. But they can’t man-in-the-middle them or send the clients to a fake-network. In the binaries, that little quite .exe-file on your computer, the public key from the Maidsafe-bootstraps are hardcoded in. So from bit 1, only the bootstraps will understand what’s going on. No person can get in the middle of that. No one. David pointed out here.

@dirvine

This is a bit out of date, the client has a bootstrap list, so you will get a public key to encrypt to that node. That allows you to pass a key in anonymous nodes for messages from the bootstrap node.

and further on:

@dirvine

This way all messages are encrypted from message 1 This prevents man in the middle attacks on join, in normal mode they are already protected as you have spotted. Good analysis

It is a bit mental, but kinda has to be these days I think.

So there goes you Fake-SAFE-network. It can’t be done on IP-level. So, to begin attacking, you need at least go to the second encryption level. That’s in XOR where you don’t know a person’s IP. Wel, you know the IP and XOR address of your relay-node. But not from your close nodes in XOR.