i2p.www/i2p2www/blog/2006/10/03/status.html

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Hi y'all, a belated status notes this week

* Index
1) Net status
2) Router dev status
3) Syndie rationale continued
4) Syndie dev status
5) Distributed version control
6) ???

* 1) Net status

The past week or two have been fairly stable on irc and other
services, though dev.i2p/squid.i2p/www.i2p/cvs.i2p had a few bumps
(due to temporary OS-related issues).  Things seem to be at a
steady state at the moment.

* 2) Router dev status

The flip side to the Syndie discussion is &quot;so, what does that mean
for the router?&quot;, and to answer that, let me explain a bit where the
router development stands right now.

On the whole, the thing holding the router back from 1.0 is in my
view its performance, not its anonymity properties.  Certainly, there
are anonymity issues to improve, but while we do get pretty good
performance for an anonymous network, our performance is not
sufficient for wider use.  In addition, improvements to the anonymity
of the network will not improve its performance (in most instances I
can think of, anonymity improvements reduce throughput and increase
latency).  We need to sort out the performance issues first, for
if the performance is insufficient, the whole system is insufficient,
regardless of how strong its anonymity techniques are.

So, what is keeping our performance back?  Oddly enough, it seems to
be our CPU usage.  Before we get to exactly why, a little more
background first.

 - to prevent partitioning attacks, we all need to plausibly build
   our tunnels from the same pool of routers.
 - to allow the tunnels to be of manageable length (and source
   routed), the routers in that pool must be directly reachable by
   anyone.
 - the bandwidth costs of receiving and rejecting tunnel join
   requests exceeds the capacity of dialup users on burst.

Therefore, we need tiers of routers - some globally reachable with
high bandwidth limits (tier A), some not (tier B).  This has already
in effect been implemented through the capacity information in the
netDb, and as of a day or two ago, the ratio of tier B to tier A
has been around 3 to 1 (93 routers of cap L, M, N, or O, and 278 of
cap K).

Now, there are basically two scarce resources to be managed in
tier A - bandwidth and CPU.  Bandwidth can be managed by the usual
means (split load across a wide pool, have some peers handle insane
amounts [e.g. those on T3s], and reject or throttle individual
tunnels and connections).

Managing CPU usage is harder.  The primary CPU bottleneck seen on
tier A routers is the decryption of tunnel build requests.  Large
routers can be (and are) entirely consumed by this activity - for
instance, the lifetime average tunnel decrypt time on one of my
routers is 225ms, and the lifetime *average* frequency of a tunnel
request decryption is 254 events per 60 seconds, or 4.2 per second.
Simply multiplying those two together and that shows that 95% of the
CPU is consumed by tunnel request decryption alone (and that doesn't
take into consideration the spikes in the event counts).  That router
still somehow manages to participate in 4-6000 tunnels at a time,
accepting approximately 80% of the decrypted requests.  

Unfortunately, because the CPU on that router is so heavily loaded,
it has to drop a significant number of tunnel build requests before
they can even be decrypted (otherwise the requests would sit on the
queue so long that even if they were accepted, the original
requestor would have considered them lost or too loaded to do
anything anyway).  In that light, the router's 80% accept rate looks
much worse - over its lifetime, it decrypted around 250k requests
(meaning around 200k were accepted), but it had to drop around 430k
requests in the decrypt queue due to CPU overload (turning that 80%
accept rate into 30%).

The solutions seem to be along the lines of reducing the relevent
CPU cost for tunnel request decryption.  If we cut the CPU time by an
order of magnitude, that would increase the tier A router's capacity
substantially, thereby reducing rejections (both explicit and
implicit, due to dropped requests).  That in turn would increase the
tunnel build success rate, thereby reducing the frequency of lease
expirations, which would then reduce the bandwidth load on the
network due to tunnel rebuilding.

One method for doing this would be to change the tunnel build
requests from using 2048bit Elgamal to, say, 1024bit or 768bit.
The problem there though is that if you break the encryption on a
tunnel build request message, you know the full path of the tunnel.
Even if we went this route, how much would it buy us?  An improvement
by an order of magnitude in the decryption time could be wiped out by
an increase of an order of magnitude in the ratio of tier B to tier A
(aka the freeriders problem), and then we'd be stuck, since there's
no way we could move to 512 or 256bit Elgamal (and look ourselves in
the mirror ;)

One alternative would be to use weaker crypto but drop the protection
for packet counting attacks that we added in with the new tunnel
build process.  That would allow us to use entirely ephemeral
negotiated keys in a Tor-like telescopic tunnel (though, again, would
expose the tunnel creator to trivial passive packet counting attacks
that identify a service).

Another idea is to publish and use even more explicit load
information in the netDb, allowing clients to more accurately detect
situations like the one above where a high bandwidth router drops 60%
of its tunnel request messages without even looking at them.  There
are a few experiments worth doing along this avenue, and they can be
done with full backwards compatability, so we should be seeing them
soon.

So, that's the bottleneck in the router/network as I see it today.
Any and all suggestions for how we can deal with it would very much
be appreciated.

* 3) Syndie rationale continued

There's a meaty post up on the forum regarding Syndie and where it
fits in with things - check it out at
<a  rel="nofollow" href="http://forum.i2p.net/viewtopic.php?t=1910">http://forum.i2p.net/viewtopic.php?t=1910</a>

Also, I'd just like to highlight two snippets from the Syndie docs
being worked on.  First, from irc (and the not-yet-out-there FAQ):

 &lt;bar&gt; a question i've been pondering is, who is later going to have
       balls big enough to host syndie production servers/archives?
 &lt;bar&gt; aren't those going to be as easy to track down as the eepsites
       are today?
 &lt;jrandom&gt; public syndie archives do not have the ability to
       *read* the content posted to forums, unless the forums publish
       the keys to do so
 &lt;jrandom&gt; and see the second paragraph of usecases.html
 &lt;jrandom&gt; of course, those hosting archives given lawful
       orders to drop a forum will probably do so
 &lt;jrandom&gt; (but then people can move to another
       archive, without disrupting the forum's operation)
 &lt;void&gt; yeah, you should mention the fact that migration to a
       different medium is going to be seamless
 &lt;bar&gt; if my archive shuts down, i can upload my whole forum to a new
       one, right?
 &lt;jrandom&gt; 'zactly bar
 &lt;void&gt; they can use two methods at the same time while migrating
 &lt;void&gt; and anyone is able to synchronize the mediums
 &lt;jrandom&gt; right void

The relevent section of (the not yet published) Syndie usecases.html
is:

  While many different groups often want to organize discussions into
  an online forum, the centralized nature of traditional forums
  (websites, BBSes, etc) can be a problem. For instance, the site
  hosting the forum can be taken offline through denial of service
  attacks or administrative action. In addition, the single host
  offers a simple point to monitor the group's activity, so that even
  if a forum is pseudonymous, those pseudonyms can be tied to the IP
  that posted or read individual messages.

  In addition, not only are the forums decentralized, they are
  organized in an ad-hoc manner yet fully compatible with other
  organization techniques. This means that some small group of people
  can run their forum using one technique (distributing the messages
  by pasting them on a wiki site), another can run their forum using
  another technique (posting their messages in a distributed
  hashtable like OpenDHT, yet if one person is aware of both
  techniques, they can synchronize the two forums together. This lets
  the people who were only aware of the wiki site talk to people who
  were only aware of the OpenDHT service without knowing anything
  about each other. Extended further, Syndie allows individual cells
  to control their own exposure while communicating across the whole
  organization.

* 4) Syndie dev status

There's been lots of progress on Syndie lately, with 7 alpha
releases handed out to folks on the irc channel.  Most of the major
issues in the scriptable interface have been addressed, and I'm
hoping we can get the Syndie 1.0 release out later this month.

Did I just say &quot;1.0&quot;?  You betcha!  While Syndie 1.0 will be a text
based application, and won't even be comparable to the usability of
other comparable text based apps (such as mutt or tin), it will
provide the full range of functionality, allow HTTP and file based
syndication strategies, and hopefully demonstrate to potential
developers Syndie's capabilities.

Right now, I'm penciling in a Syndie 1.1 release (allowing people
to organize their archives and reading habits better) and maybe a
1.2 release to integrate some search functionality (both simple
searches and maybe lucene's fulltext searches).  Syndie 2.0 will
probably be the first GUI release, with the browser plugin coming
with 3.0.  Support for additional archives and message distribution
networks will be coming when implemented, of course (freenet,
mixminion/mixmaster/smtp, opendht, gnutella, etc).

I realize though that Syndie 1.0 won't be the earth shaker that some
want, as text based apps are really for the geeks, but I'd like to
try to break us of the habit of viewing &quot;1.0&quot; as a terminal release
and instead consider it a beginning.

* 5) Distributed version control

So far, I've been mucking around with subversion as the vcs for
Syndie, even though I'm only really fluent in CVS and clearcase.
This is because I'm offline most of the time, and even when I am
online, dialup is slow, so subversion's local diff/revert/etc
has been quite handy.  However, yesterday void poked me with the
suggestion that we look into one of the distributed systems
instead.

I looked at them a few years back when evaluating a vcs for I2P,
but I dismissed them because I didn't need their offline
functionality (I had good net access then) so learning them wasn't
worthwhile.  Thats not the case anymore, so I'm looking at them a
bit more now.

- From what I can see, darcs, monotone, and codeville are the top
contenders, and darcs' patch-based vcs seems particularly attractive.
For instance, I can do all my work locally and just scp up the 
gzip'ed &amp; gpg'ed diffs to an apache directory on dev.i2p.net, and
people can contribute their own changes by posting their gzip'ed and
gpg'ed diffs to locations of their choice.  When it comes time to tag
a release, I'd make a darcs diff which specifies the set of patches
contained within the release and push that .gz'ed/.gpg'ed diff up
like the others (as well as push out actual tar.bz2, .exe, and .zip
files, of course ;)

And, as a particularly interesting point, these gzip'ed/gpg'ed diffs
can be posted as attachments to Syndie messages, allowing Syndie to
be self-hosting.

Anyone have any experience with these suckers though?  Any advice?

* 6) ???

Only 24 screenfulls of text this time (including the forum post) ;)
I unfortunately wasn't able to make it to the meeting, but as always,
I'd love to hear from you if you've got any ideas or suggestions -
just post up to the list, the forum, or swing on by IRC.

=jr
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