Re: hash-based requests

>From: Justin Cormack <[email protected]>
> Have been thinking about the idea of making all requests and have messages
> refer to hashes rather than block offsets.

Makes a lot of sense for REQUEST and PIECE messages, turns out to make
a lot less sense for HAVE. BITFIELD/HAVE are about maintaining a bitmap,
a data structure almost completely unrelated to large blobs of data
indexed by a 20 byte string.

> It all works pretty well except that at the beginning when you only have the
> root hash, you can be sent a have message for a block you know nothing about
> because you dont yet have the tree (you dont even know which torrent it is
> from yet). Has anyone thought of a solution to this yet? You could store them
> but this gives a potential DoS by just making up random numbers and saying you
> have those pieces.

If HAVE messages are somehow indexed to tree location, then it works
pretty well.

> The other alternative is a two-phase protocol where you first obtain the Merkle
> tree before you can do anything else.

I'm working on a sample implementation which computes the hashes, and
uses a midsize branching factor. Turns out working with n-ary trees isn't
always easy.  %-)


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