This article presents an overview of the findings of the 2014 ‘Survey on
ICT (information and communication technology) usage in households and
by individuals’. It takes a closer look at individuals’ internet and
mobile internet use in the EU and a set of newly released indicators relating to the use of cloud services.
Lots of useful stats, but what caught my eye was this:
…
Among those internet users who were aware [of cloud services], concerns about security and privacy were a major factor that prevented them from using such services.
VPN’s aren’t decentralized like MaidSafe. We don’t know what happens when the NSA goes after MaidSafe, though the fact that for example Tor was also attacked at the more centralized points might give us some hope. MaidSafe has none, so hopefully the core of MaidSafe will never be compromised.
@upstate This is off-topic so I would move it to a new topic except I think it is too vague to title! If a discussion ensues I’ll do so then. I don’t think this can be answered because it is general, but if you can imagine a specific way the NSA and so on might attack MaidSafe then that would be a good topic/question that could be responded to.
The title is incorrect by the way. The 44% is of the population of the dark blue slice of this pie chart, so it’s about 12% of the EU population that is concerned with security and privacy:
@happybeing I was hoping to get a response of this would never been possible with Maidsafe. I apologize also because I could have swore this whole string was posted in off-topic.
Couldn’t they setup nodes all over the network and snoop on all the traffic? In the beginning I would think this is possible but as the size of the network increases it would become harder to accomplish but with enough resources it could still be done?
Just setting up nodes and using them to snoop doesn’t reveal anything. The traffic is encrypted and they only see data arriving with a destination address that can’t be mapped to an actual PC or geographical location. Also, those addresses change all the time due to churn. The network can’t be 100% secure, but it is very very hard to subvert, and as you suggest, it gets harder and harder as the network grows because there is safety in the number of nodes.
Your questions are valid and good to ask - I suggest you think a bit more and then post any new concerns in a new thread with a suitable title. If you want to go further with this particular concern, carry on by all means and I’ll spin it into a new thread.
There’s no such thing, with infinite resources any security can be broken. Security is about making the costs of an attack so high that it’s not profitable to do so.
All data traffic is peer-to-peer encrypted, so especially for snooping on private data this is pretty useless. For public data, I think if you have nodes in a great many groups at some point it might be possible to identify which IP addresses are accessing particular pieces by cross-referencing GET requests.
It’d be an immense operation though, especially because if I understand correctly nodes with similar rank tend to be grouped. So you’d not only need a great many nodes, but you also need to have them spread across the Rank range proportional to the rest of the network, or else be excluded from large swaths of groups. Also, they can’t just be dummy nodes, they need to contribute to the network or else they’re kicked out of groups.
