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Had content based urls been a thing 20 years ago, presumably there would have evolved technology for mobile ISPs to host border caches that end users could trus
by jasonjayr 3y ago
Had content based urls been a thing 20 years ago, presumably there would have evolved technology for mobile ISPs to host border caches that end users could trust 100% without worry of nefarious manipulation.
- zaphirplane 3y agoIs content here mean, assets and/or web pages ? How would it work for a webpage that loads a bunch of Javascript libraries from some CDN ? The page can have significant changes over time as the JavaScript libraries change
- jonhohle 3y agoContent addressable means the URI contains some information uniquely describing the content (typically a cryptographic hash). So if you load https://cdn/js/e3b0c44298fc1c149afbf4c8996fb92427ae41e4649b934ca495991b7852b855.js https://cdn/js/e3b0c44298fc1c149afbf4c8996fb92427ae41e4649b9... you’ll always know it will contain exactly the same contents, regardless of where it comes from (and that can be verified by the client as well).
- zaphirplane 3y agoIn the hypothetical I describe the content of web app is fixed the app itself isn’t Kind of like linking to the newest song, the link is static the content changes
- ikiris 3y agoWhy would an ISP want to pay the cost of doing this?
- birracerveza 3y agoBecause they would profit from selling data on their users' activity, as usual
- runeks 3y agoMy guess would be to reduce transit fees. I know my local ISP caches the Google homepage (I assume this is the reason).
- tetsuhamu 3y agoThey sometimes pay for traffic out of their network. And sometimes companies pay them to host caches.
- kevincox 3y agoProviding faster service would provide value to their customers.
- yencabulator 3y agoWhy would an ISP host a Netflix CDN box for free? Same thing, decrease bandwidth usage on their peering connections.
- tempaccount420 3y agoExcept then your ISP could see what you download, which I doubt many would like.
- jasonjayr 3y agoTrue, I guess. Are there any ways that could be mitigated?
- yencabulator 3y agoYou can derive an encryption key from both the plaintext content and a shared secret, and store content-addressed encrypted blobs on the open internet, so that only the parties that know the shared secret and a hash of the plaintext can decrypt the blobs. I don't have a great write-up published (only working code!) but if you know Graphviz, see https://github.com/bazil/plop/blob/main/doc/crypto.dot https://github.com/bazil/plop/blob/main/doc/crypto.dot -- or study Tahoe-LAFS. Of course, shared secrets scale poorly beyond individual users and groups of friends. But there's fundamental limitations there, you need to do access control by some secret knowledge.
- jasonjayr 3y agoThis is similar to Freenet, right? Content Addressable URLs that have a content hash + a key, and you have to have both to decrypt the content?
- yencabulator 3y agoProbably; I don't know Freenet internals all that well. As far as I know, Tahoe-LAFS improved on the state of the art by preventing the "Confirmation of File Attack". https://tahoe-lafs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/convergence-secret.html https://tahoe-lafs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/convergence-secr...