Egregoros

SLUFI is published!

https://thegoodwork.substack.com/p/slufi

A Simple, Lightweight, Unopinionated, Federation Interconnect.

The problem: While numerous network transports exist (cjdns, Yggdrasil, I2P, Tor, etc), and numerous name services exist (Namecoin, ENS, Unstoppable Domains, PKT, etc), almost all federation takes place over ICANN+IP because we currently have no way to federate across network boundaries, and ICANN+IP is the only thing that everybody has.

I claim that there is no possible solution SIMPLER than SLUFI, except with central authority or PRECIPITOUS loss of security. Furthermore, I claim there is no possible solution that is more secure than SLUFI, except with something like a blockchain and a PRECIPITOUS loss of simplicity.

So while I do not think this protocol is complete (yet), I do think SLUFI is the only realistic starting point for reaching a solution to this problem.

Tagging some people who might be interested:
@sun
@lain
@p
@mint
@jaff
@silverpill

I probably forgot a bunch of very important people, apologies in advance...

Yeah, this is probably the weakest part of the SLUFI spec.

> The announce endpoint must be rate-limited with regard to the announcement of never before seen nodes so as to limit resource exhaustion denial of service through the creation of fake nodes. A node should not be considered “never before seen” unless its last DSR has expired more than 1 week ago. Every node must also impose a maximum DSR count, and when this number is reached, no DSRs of nodes not currently in the database are accepted at all, either by announcement or gossip. Finally, nodes accepting announcements must offer some method of blacklisting such that invalid nodes can be permanently excluded. Additional limits such as maximum nodes per second level domain are also recommended.

There isn't much else you can do here, but someone who wants to be a dickhead can just sit there and keep the announcements at rate limit.

MAYBE, I could put a hashcash option on the /announce endpoint. I'm thinking I'll probably write the trusted/gossipper server as a standalone, and then the pleroma patch will just be as a leaf node