Hacker News Reader

Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

We need a mesh networking standard which is trustless. Ie. anyone can join the mesh, but not easily disrupt it and be evil.

Today 802.11s is a great mesh standard, but it isn't trustless - all mesh nodes need to know the network password, and if you shared that password with the world, then someone could join and make the entire mesh stop working (and steal all your data).

View on HN

It's ridiculously easy to disrupt low power wireless networks of any kind, no matter what the protocol or standard.

Anyone can make the whole mesh stop working today, even without a password.

With Wifi, I can easily disrupt within a few hundred yards of my house. But disrupting something a few miles away is much harder.

With a mesh network, the network is much bigger, which makes it important an attacker can only disrupt their small corner of the network.

> But disrupting something a few miles away is much harder.

If you follow the rules. Presumably an attacker wouldn't care about that, and would be happy to dump a few orders of magnitude extra power into their jamming signal.

Yeah, and if they had gasoline and matches they could go around and burn down everyone's houses. The point is that the protocol shouldn't have a flaw that allows local traffic to have harmful nonlocal effects.

I think FCC still cares about jamming signals, although they might make an exception for inexpensive mesh networks...

A big one set off from a mile up is the normal way science fiction predicts the chaos begins.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com