[PLUG-TALK] Server sky - geographic routing

[drew wymore]

On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 9:16 AM, Keith Lofstrom <keithl at kl-ic.com> wrote:
> About 10 months back, I presented Server Sky to advanced topics,
> and have presented it about 20 times since.  Data centers in
> orbit, not competing for grid power, direct high bandwidth data
> links to ground sites, open technology, and thousands of jobs for
> our region.  The idea is taking a long time to "launch", but it
> is gaining traction.
>
> I wanted to talk a bit about the pros and cons of the direct data
> links.  Like anything new, there are pluses and minuses.  I would
> like to hear more ideas.
>
> The pluses include:
>
> 1) Supplementing current ground infrastructure:  With rapidly
> steerable radio links, we can provide broadband to regions that
> don't have it, or extra to regions that are congested, shifting
> capacity in real time.  A boon for developing nations.
>
> 2) Reliability: If the electricity driving key repeaters or
> switches or routers on the ground fails, Server Sky radio links
> are still running.
>
> 3) Transnational provisioning:  Server Sky can provide internet
> and data to regions that are cut off or censored by local
> political or legal restriction, though still subject to
> International Telecommunication Union restrictions (sigh).
>
> And here's the one I want to focus on:
>
> 4) Geographic route verification:  IP address assignment is partly
> geographic - a particular IP address can be routed because the
> routing fabric knows what particular set of switches to run it
> through.  However, switch manufacturers cut corners, maintaining
> transient connection tunnels rather than stateless routing of each
> packet.  This permits bogus IP addresses to be used for spamming.
>
> Server-sky permits "direct routing", straight from the orbiting
> data center to the client's neighborhood or even personal antenna.
> Ground spot size from full size arrays will be less than a kilometer,
> and routing will be geographic.  It will be very difficult for an
> spammer on the other side of the world to pretend to be in a
> particular footprint.
>
> 4a) This is very good for protecting the Server Sky array itself
> from attack.  The control packets are validated on a separate
> band.  The array knows where its control centers are physically
> located.  If those are secure (hetrogeneous technology will help),
> then the array can easily ignore bogus control signals sent from
> elsewhere, while detecting where the bad guys are (control band
> communications coming from where it should not be) to within a
> 1km spot.
>
> This may also be a minus, and I want some ideas here.
>
> Minus 4:  The localization properties help bad governments locate
> good guys, too. :-(  The localization is within a kilometer, but
> this greatly reduces the size of the search team necessary to
> locate particular users.  The information stream is encrypted,
> of course, but packet timing analysis can still match the source
> of a data stream to a particular node.
>
> While this is "more anonymous" than tracking individual users with
> Carnivore-style monitoring and hard fiber links, there may be ways
> of evading detection on hard links that will be harder to use if
> kilometer-scale radio localization is available.  We will still
> have access to steganography and anonymous remailers and such.
> Using virtual technology in space, those remailers will be at
> least as easy to operate and protect.
>
> While Server Sky facilitates what we do for free software and free
> information, the radio links may (or may not) reduce privacy.  What
> am I overlooking here?
>
> Keith
>
> --
> Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
> KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
> Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs
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Keith,
I don't know whether this idea is plausible/scalable but why not use
something like a global nat'ing type route infrastructure to provide
another layer anonymity? For example: Public IP's on the radio links
in space itself but the ground stations utilizing it would have
private IP connectivity to the Server Sky infrastructure itself. That
way, if packets are being snatched out of the air and somehow
decrypted or sourced because you are re-using private IP space
throughout the world, it would be harder to identify the source in
that fashion. Obviously the link pulse problem is another issue
altogether, I don't know enough about radio communication but
something like random beacon pulses not associated with user
communication necessarily in order to add some other obfuscation of
source? Just tossing ideas out there. They are probably immediately
worth tossing in the trash but something is better than nothing right?

Drew-