SAFE Network concerns from an old employee

[dirvine]

@yvon.fortier

In particular this one:

An additional problematic area is when nodes connect or disconnect. A group can losequorum if enough nodes drop out simultaneously, which would mean thatno more updates can be made to the resource. OR new nodes couldreplicate the data from the remaining members of the group which arebelow quorum. But if the network were partitioned instead, both sidesof the partition would replicate/repair the quorum and continue toaccept writes. The network would then need an algorithm for merging twodata forks.

This, in particular has been discussed many times on this forum. A group size is chosen in any dht to be of a size that’s infeasible to lose the whole group (think whole, quorum etc. as same thing) in a refresh time. A refresh is generally 30 or 60 mins, but in SAFE the nodes are directly connected, so refresh is as close to network speed as possible. This makes this significantly less feasible.

Regardless of that, with disjoint groups and data_chains, merge/split of groups is handled as a natural thing. These make that even better handled and data chains itself does directly address a split/merge/data republish etc. Network partitioning is always something to consider, like earthquakes etc. and this is where data republish makes a huge difference. Securely doing so is hard, but we like hard in MaidSafe

The reason we don’t directly respond to all such points is

1. They are generally mis-informed
2. A single person takes out one of our Engineers for a while to answer it
3. It’s already answered several times
4. It’s a point about probability and all possible outcomes are possible, but not feasible
5. It’s not a great way to start looking properly at any subject. Engage, clarify, understand and then critique is very helpful though

I take time to answer things where I can, but the cost is very high, so I focus on the forum mostly. Several other email lists and forums have some of us (esp me) going into several days/weeks long explanations that would be very much quicker answered by reading the papers/wiki or search here etc. Initially I did spend that time, but right now if somebody wished to damage progress, this is exactly what they would do. Just state some “fact” that’s not all that relevant or perhaps particular to SAFE and make it sound feasible. It’s very clever, but a time sink. I am not saying this was the case here, I suspect just mistaken in areas that could have been cleared up very easily here initially.

My honest opinion these days, at this point is launch, launch, launch and have bug bounties, security bounties etc. and let folk point to a bit of code and show a real world exploit when we are up and running. Right now it’s not worth digging up old and incorrect assumptions and explaining them all to everyone who makes them. During Alpha we have said there are several security updates, the RFC’s clearly state what is being improved and hopefully that helps everyone.

Hope that makes sense.