kettle11
Harden Tangle to Malicious Peers
If a peer is malicious they should only be able to cause a bad experience for themselves. Tangle should be audited to find any potential ways a malicious peer could intentionally desync another peer. In scenarios with only one other peer this is likely impossible to do perfectly, but in rooms with 2+ peers it's should be possible to verify and reach consensus. In some cases a peer could be designated as a source of authority that all peers should defer to, like when running an authoritative server.
Would you consider a simple majority consensus logic based on something light (e.g. some hash)?
Potentially misunderstanding the suggestions here, but it could also seat quite well with the solution to https://github.com/kettle11/tangle/issues/7 (Dirty Flags) and a simple majority based on the content hashes of the deltas (which may require comparing a list of hashes if multiple changes are being synced)?
Yeah, hashing is likely the solution to detect and resync peers who have desynced.
The issue I want to prevent is a malicious peer sending bogus messages (or omitting messages) to just one peer in an effort to sabotage them. Imagine an evil peer (we'll call peer E) is in a room with a bunch of others and they want to sabotage peer A. Peer E could send A a bunch of bogus messages causing peer A to continuously desync.
Hash consensus could be used by peer A to detect that it's desynced (and likely something like that should exist anyways) but it will still give peer A a degraded experience, or at least give peer A increased latency. Is there a better way?
Another issue is when joining a room how can a peer know it's being sent the correct data? Likely a peer should receive a hash of the room state from a few peers and the full room state from one peer and then verify the hash itself when it receives the room state.