[mnet-devel] What does EGTP do that a PGP message doesn't

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

 Art wrote:
>
> I want link encryption.
> 
> "Why?" you ask...
> 
> Becuase I want to run mnet while on client sites. And I don't want them to
> know what I am running. Sure, if they knew about mnet and were running a
> node they might notice, but if my traffic is unencrypted they difinately
> will.
> 
> I like link encryption.

Good point.  With EGTPv1, they can see that you are running some funny 
protocol that starts with a 0-byte or a 1-byte, followed by a 4-byte length 
and then that many random bytes.  They won't think that you are using 
SSL-protected web sites, but they probably won't guess what you *are* doing 
(until EGTP becomes a lot more popular and sysadmins get modules for their 
sniffer programs that detect it).

There might be other patterns in EGTP messages that are detectable, but there 
isn't any human-readable string sent in cleartext that says "Hi!  I'm a 
subversive emergent network hacker!  See http://sf.net/projects/mnet/.".

One the other hand, the pattern of what ports you listen to and how 
connections get opened and closed will be more useful information, and will 
probably look exactly like a file-sharing app and trigger their "file-sharing-
detector" scripts.

Interesting how traffic analysis is actually used in practice nowadays, not 
because the user is protected by high-tech Chaumian mixes, but because it is 
easier to do traffic analysis than to parse message formats.

--Z



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