4 ms·

> Much better security-wise than most scenarios nowadays. Can you elaborate on this?

• alecco 17y ago
  Note I'm kind of thinking out loud, and in this idea was about P2P conferencing, so it's not for local network or well connected offices. More like a very typical scenario of several people connecting from different locations (e.g. working from home plus remote offices.) Using a VPN (centralized) adds a lot of latency and degrades the experience. Using a third party service (MS, WebEx, Lotus) often adds trusting them with your dearest corporate secrets and allows them (and the authorities on their respective countries) to spy on the conference or even simply detect your users's IPs to direct attacks to their more vulnerable home computers full of interesting data. With some service set up like this the users can just have an "initiator" "server", who's software just checks its NAT external IP (thousands of existing free services and web pages give you this) and creates a meeting URI. They send it by some secure channel (e.g. email over vpn) to the other parties. The rest conenct to the initiator "server" and discover each other's IP. If the protocol is carefully designed the clients and server can have a shared secret on the URI to avoid Man-in-the-middle. Voilà! This can easily be an open source product with zero server costs (unlike WebEx, Skype, MS.) Of course, this works only for clients with NAT access and others should connect in other ways (e.g. HTTPS and/or UPnP.) My point was that even the corporate network and security teams can benefit from this in some way. It's not just to set up quake servers on college networks.