Proposal 144: enforce distinct providers

[Cat Okita]

On Thu, 3 Jul 2008, M Fr wrote:
> First, because this excellent paper
> http://freehaven.net/anonbib/#feamster:wpes2004 as already
> demonstrated that it's not necessary because of the BGP logic of
> traffic repartition between peering and providers.

That paper doesn't address the question of how exchanges fit into the global
routing structure, and also makes naive assumptions about how traffic is
repartitioned.

> The objective is to prevent people observing a circuit with all
> routers in the same provider area.

>> Further, without correlation of leaf nodes that are partially or completely
>> subsumbed in a given AS, changing AS numbers isn't really indicative of any
>> useful characteristic.  For that matter, without correlating all of the AS
>> numbers owned by a given entity (an interesting challenge, to be polite),
>> there's no guarantee at all that a changing AS reflects anything at all.
>>
> Please check the list referenced
> http://as4jtw5gc6efb267.onion/IPListbyAS.txt if you find many
> redundant providers. I've not found many cases in fact two (Road
> Runner and one chinese operator)
> For more than 90% of nodes it's efficient.

I'm looking at that file, and need some clarification.  It looks like the
file consists of a list of tor nodes and their associated AS -- is that 
correct?  Also - over what time period was this information collected?

> Perhaps as i've said the proposal could be improved making AS family
> but cos i've no ideas on circuit build in china, i've not added any
> restrictive proposal.
> And also I don't  want to increase network latency.
> This proposal is supposed to be iso-latency.

To spell it out - even looking at the list that you've provided, I can
see multiple cases where you have a node that's on an AS which hangs off
of one or two entities already listed, so you've immediately got an overlap.

There's also a notable lack of some of the tier-1 ISPs -- and that's before
even considering the question of physical vs virtual circuits.

>> Beyond that, if you're still talking about classful address space in this
>> day
>> and age, I'd suggest that some consideration of modern networking might well
>> be in order...
> Sorry English is not my mother langage, sometimes i use the more
> simple language for me.

FYI:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIDR

> How can you improve this proposal ?

I'm honestly not certain that I can think of a way that this proposal can be
improved enough to be a help, rather than a hinderance.

cheers!

>> On Tue, 1 Jul 2008, Nick Mathewson wrote:
>>>
>>> Filename: 144-enforce-distinct-providers.txt
>>> Title: Increase the diversity of circuits by detecting nodes belonging the
>>> same provider
>>> Author: Mfr
>>> Created: 2008-06-15
>>> Status: Draft
>

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