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BGP Blockchain
- floatinglotus 4y agoWell, after reading a bit of it I can safely say that is completely moronic and it makes complete sense that it was written by someone at Futurewei.
- colesantiago 4y agoI pressed CTRL-F in my browser to search for the term "April Fools" in this RFC and I was extremely disappointed that there was no results.
- Flowdalic 4y agoIt is not an RFC, it is an I-D (Internet Draft).
- m00dy 4y agoI think BGP protocol is an excellent use case for blockchain
- arcticbull 4y agoYes I too have always said the problem with BGP is that it's way too efficient. It's going to be great in the next conflict when Russia simply takes over majority control of the network and reroutes traffic at will and we will all have to go along with it because the longest chain wins.
- everfree 4y agoIt's unclear to me specifically what type of attack you are describing. One does not "simply take over majority control of the network". Edit: Looking at the votes, it seems like I may be the only one who it's unclear to. Could someone please fill me in?
- kayamon 4y agoThere is only one valid blockchain at any given time -- the longest one (currently Bitcoin). Any attempt such as this one to create a new blockchain will always be shorter than the pre-existing longer blockchain, thereby making this attempt susceptible to a 51% attack from outside its network.
- everfree 4y agoBitcoin is not the only valid blockchain in existence, if that's what you're implying (your comment is unclear to me). A blockchain's length (or more specifically, total accumulated work), does not play a direct part in determining its susceptibility to 51% attacks. Furthermore, blockchains are only susceptible to cross-chain attacks like this when they use a proof of work consensus mechanism and also share the same hashing algorithm.
- throwawaymaths 4y agoFor some definition of "valid". Nobody is stopping you from trusting a different "parallel universe" branch of the Blockchain, you just don't do it because most likely no one else will trust your work and it will be pointless work. Or you do in fact do it because it's a coordinated soft fork (there is a subpopulation that you care about that will together accept this parallel history and reject the mainline history). Construct an appropriate analogy for the bgp use case.
- dgellow 4y agoIf you fork, don’t you have the same length (at least at the moment of fork), by definition?
- kayamon 4y agoYou fork a blockchain by linking new blocks on the end (with bitcoin.pdf forming an implicit start node they all kicked off from). Whichever of the forks persuades enough people to continue mining on it becomes the real blockchain and the people will slowly stop working on the other forks. The shorter blockchain will never find enough people to mine it when there's a larger more lucrative blockchain to mine.
- danielheath 4y agoEliding the (at this point frankly tiresome) arguments over cryptocurrency: Like most BGP security proposals, it suggests that you could validate that BGP announcements come from the owner of the prefix. Unlike most BGP security proposals, it lacks any specific mechanism to do so ('store it in a blockchain so ISPs can get the data' is insufficient - where is the description of the data format, the mining incentives, initial chain seeding, etc). Blockchain solves the problem of distributed consensus in the presence of unknown actors. However, no ISP is peering with an unknown actor, and distributed consensus between mutually trusting parties can be solved far more simply than a blockchain. BGP absolutely needs a mechanism to validate ownership of the prefix you are announcing. At its core, that means a list of prefixes and the public key of the owning institution, plus a signature field in the BGP packet. The interesting bit of any BGP enhancement is the governance of changes to the list of prefixes and keys.
- brazzy 4y ago>The interesting bit of any BGP enhancement is the governance of changes to the list of prefixes and keys. Doesn't that sound like a basically valid use case for a blockchain? Not saying that it's necessarily the best solution, but having that governance based on some kind of distributed consensus protocol does sound reasonable, and that's what a blockchain fundamentally provides.
- mort96 4y agoI don't know about you, but I would prefer it if the security of critical Internet infrastructure wasn't dependent on the popularity of some shitcoin. Which would be necessary, since the distributed consensus depends on the financial motivation for people to spend resources on mining new blocks. You'd need enough random people mining that a government couldn't do a 51% attack.
- 0x64 4y agoWhat makes you think a network like this would be PoW in the first place? It could just be PoA.
- grenran 4y agohard pass
- grnmamba 4y agoFyi: This is an "internet draft". Anyone can write one and get it published with little to no review.
- rvz 4y agoExactly. Just like the deeply flawed JWT RFC when that was first introduced?
- grnmamba 4y agoI'm not sure what your argument is. Are you implying that every internet draft eventually becomes an RFC?
- rvz 4y ago> Are you implying that every internet draft eventually becomes an RFC? No. I am saying even one of the worst designed specifications with tons of flaws and hype around it somehow made its way into being an RFC and still being used all over the internet for sessions [0] with many reasons why it is a critically flawed RFC. [1] [0] https://apibakery.com/blog/no-jwt/ https://apibakery.com/blog/no-jwt/ [1] https://paragonie.com/blog/2021/08/paseto-is-even-more-secure-alternative-jose-standards-jwt-etc https://paragonie.com/blog/2021/08/paseto-is-even-more-secur...
- oefrha 4y agoIt’s also very hand-wavy. Can’t say I learned much from reading the whole document than just reading the title.
- hkt 4y agoDoes this achieve anything that signed announcements wouldn't?
- thebeastie 4y agoThe announcements have to live somewhere and the idea is to use a shared ledger ie a blockchain.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hkt 4y agoThe announcements are already peer to peer in BGP. Again, what does block chain add that eg, BGPsec (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7353.txt https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7353.txt) does not?
- notreallyserio 4y agoUnless I missed it in that RFC document blockchain adds a shared ledger, as thebeastie mentioned. Aka an unalterable shared record of what changed, when, and by whom.
- lottin 4y ago> The announcements have to live somewhere As opposed to living nowhere?
- thebeastie 4y agoThe sad thing about this post is that there are much better developed visions of using blockchain as an index for internet routing: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405959520304938 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240595952... https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8751229 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8751229 I’m pretty sure there are non academic projects too but I can’t find them atm.
- borlox 4y agoThey failed to publish that draft on 1st and only published it on 27th. This makes the obvious joke about blockchain being useful a bit obscure.
- baby 4y agoWrong forum? We actually care about tech here
- mnd999 4y agoSeems like they started with ‘How can I apply a blockchain to the problem?’ instead of ‘What is the best way to solve this problem?’. It’s easy to do, focusing on the interesting tech instead of the actual business problem.
- l33t2328 4y agoI don’t even think blockchain counts as interesting tech. Hash functions are old.
- SuchAnonMuchWow 4y agohash functions are not what is new with blockchains: its the distributed zero-trust consensus algorithms.
- c0mptonFP 4y agoThat's what technical crypto skeptics always do, it's one of the most common reductionist comments you can find on technical forums: - Blockchain is just an inefficient linked list/database - Merkle Trees have existed since the 70s - Distributed systems have existed since the 80s - ZK proofs have existed since the 80s Completely disregarding any advances in cryptography or consensus. Usually they throw in a reference to some other unrelated consensus algorithm like Paxos or Raft to seem smart. And if you attempt to highlight some advances in the DLT space, you will be accused of "spouting buzzwords". There's literally no way to communicate with a person who has already decided they don't care.
- mnd999 4y agoHave you considered the possibility that the reason you’re not convincing people is that you’ve just got it wrong?
- c0mptonFP 4y agoIf I was wrong they could just give me a sound argument instead of directing insults at me and throwing "witty" reductionist jabs. Do you think that argument structure is sound? By that logic quantum computing is a scam, because quantum theory has existed for a century.
- baby 4y agoThis is great! I’ve been thinking a lot about the web PKI and I’m convinced that the future is a blockchain there. The current situation just doesn’t make sense, where too many CAs have powers to mess up and revocation barely work. And sometimes we can detect some of the attacks, instead of preventing them. In the future we’ll have a public registry implemented as a blockchain where browsers will receive light zero-knowledge proof of non-revoked certificate inclusion.
- hiq 4y ago> implemented as a blockchain Why?