Subject: [Ecrit] LoST-Synchronization & Loop prevention?

From: "Alexander Mayrhofer" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2009 10:53:29 +0100

Hello,

I've just thought about something that i haven't seen discussed in any
of the documents yet. Assume that there are 3 forest guides, which have
the following "sync relations".

     A -------- B
      \        /
       \      /
        \    /
         \  /
          C

Assuming that "A" gets updated, it would then send Sync messages to B
(and probably C). B in turn would probably redistribute the message
received from A over to C (because from the perspective of B, it
compromises new information to be distributed) - B wouldn't know that C
has already received the information from A directly. 

I understand that "source", "sourceid" and "last updated" could be used
to identify whether a message has already been seen. However, my guts
feeling tells me that there could be situations in which a FG rewrites
information that it has received, and essentially creates messages that
cannot be correlated with the original message (or, simple
implementation problems...) 

I understand it looks like NNTP - I'm just curious if loop prevention
has been considered, and discussed in detail ... "injecting" a loop into
the global network of FGs could be a very effective DoS attack...

Alex