Babel RTT route verification

This is one of the more interesting and ‘novel’ things that Althea has going on as a protocol.

Althea’s route verification scheme outlined in the whitepaper is less of a trustless mesh protocol and more of a ‘less trustfull’ mesh protocol.

In secure scalable source routing it’s possible to identify faults more specifically. But Althea is trying to retain distance vectors inherent efficiency. The tradeoff for this is that verification is weak and can prevent dramatic instances of fraud but subtle instances may remain hard to find.

Our design is to have distance vector propogation of the round trip time to any destination in the network using a full path rtt extension to Babel of our own design.

This RTT is then verified over the secured exit traffic tunnel between the exit and the client device. This assumes that the exit is not conspiring with actors within the network.

Exactly how subtle is ‘subtle’? Well that’s part of what we’re still finding out.

This is the current full path RTT implementation. So far it doesn’t look accurate. But we need to collect some data and compare.

@drozdziak1 I’d appreciate if you could drop your thoughts in this thread.