Well, again, perhaps I am not understanding the proposal here, but to spell out what I have in mind...

  1. Some monk (perhaps not Anonymous Monk, but a registered user) posts a message from IP address "a.b.c.d".
  2. Along with the message, some hash of "a.b.c.d" is posted as well.
  3. The hash is such that "a.b.c" is separate from "d".
  4. Another monk can look at hash("a.b.c") and make many guesses as to what "a.b.c" is. This is the brute force.
  5. Now the other monk has the source IP of the original monk's access. This probably gives a pretty good idea of the original monk's location, which the original monk may not have wanted to be public.

There are only 16_777_216 possibilities for "a.b.c", and that's if I search every country and every IP block that I know isn't registered to anyone.

I think I just now figured out the disconnect here. You're saying that the algorithm for hashing IP addresses here won't be public. As such, there won't be a way for people to try a dictionary attack against it. This is why you talk about spoofing IP addresses. Without a public algorithm, the only way to run dictionary attacks would be to spoof IP addresses and see what the site calls them.

...and now I see you say exactly that in Re^7: monastery mark-upedness (brute force)

You also seem to be saying that this won't be used on registered users (only the literal Anonymous Monk). If that's the case, I don't see how it would help with sock puppetry, but that doesn't really concern me.

OK, glad that's all cleared up. Thanks for your patience.

In reply to Re^9: monastery mark-upedness (privacy) by kyle
in thread monastery mark-upedness by my_nihilist

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