Re: Reducing nick-collision takeovers

[borud@xxxxxxxxxxx]

[Kaspar Landsberg]
| 
| When a client (user) registers (right after connecting to the
| server), one could add for each new user a random number (between 0
| and n) to its structure. Then, when a nick collision occurs, the two
| involved servers check the random number of 'the other' user. If,
| for example, it's higher than the number of the local user, the
| latter gets killed. If it's lower, the local user doesn't get
| killed. If both random numbers are equal, both users get killed.

shoot me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that sceme just reduce the
probability of being killed by a nick collider from 100% to 50%
statistically speaking?  in that case the attacker would just up the
number of attempts at collision and we're back to square one.

| The whole idea would make it very hard to takeover a channel which
| has more than a few channel operators (more than 1 - 4
| maybe). [Altho i don't know if this would really work as expected in
| reality...]

it would make it harder, but not very hard IMHO, and harder isn't
really going to cut it when the counter-move is obvious and easy to
implement.

the only thing that would work is timestamps or, what we use now, that
the server remembers nicks for a period of time after a split.
timestamps seem to be out of the question (I don't remember the exact
rationale for this,  but at the time it was presented I agreed that
whoever presented it had an important point).

| PS I know, this is not an elegant solution...
| PPS I do still think, 'forced nick change' is so far the best approach.

'forced nick change' is not a good idea for a number of reasons.  one
of them being the inherent latency in IRC networks and the chance that
two servers would produce the same 'random unused nick', resulting in
yet another forced nick change.

I can picture grotesque scenarios where someone provokes chains of
forced nick changes and generates loads of broadcast. waah!

-Bjørn
-- 
 Bjørn Borud <borud@xxxxxxxxxxx>       | "The Net interprets censorship 
 <URL:http://www.pvv.unit.no/~borud/>  | as damage and routes around it."
 UNIX person, one of "them"            |         - John Gilmore