A word of warning about using Meshcore as transport for other networks

[ComradeC]

Hey everyone.

Backstory:

In the spring, our mesh ran into an anomaly — GRP_DATA packets going round the network 24/7 at short intervals. At the time it didn't bother us too much — well, sure, someone is experimenting with something, they’ll grow bored of it soon enough. Summer season was just round the corner, perfect timing for tinkering with solar repeaters. Besides, the mesh still had plenty of bandwidth to spare, so we just turned a blind eye to the problem.

Summer came. Along with expanding the mesh network, we started rolling out regions, with all the ensuing debates, arguments and problems. GRP_DATA went quiet at the end of June. And so, we figured that was the end of the story. But no.

At the beginning of October, it came back. That's when we really got to work — wardriving, analytics, etc. The whole shebang. We actually managed to pinpoint the source building (wasn’t easy, believe me). A whole lot of legwork, and if I were to describe all of it, this post would be twice as long. In the end, the problem was solved through social means — a search of the local Meshtastic community — we finally managed to find the person responsible.

Now to the main part:

It was just one guy with three devices flashed with Blackout Comms. They were practically never used for communication, so 20% of our entire network's traffic (around 8% of full airtime) was taken up by round-the-clock relaying of location, temperature and other telemetry, Meshtastic-style. One of the “features” of Blackout Comms is that it can use Meshcore to relay their messages. And the owner of these devices didn't even know he was transmitting anything. He just picked “Meshcore mode” and entered local radio config.

There's an opinion in our community that, due to vibe coding boom, this won't be the last (and possibly not the first) project of its kind using Meshcore for its own purposes. And so, the question is — how do the community and the developers feel about such… well… parasitic networks? They aggressively use other people’s infrastructure for their own purposes and give absolutely nothing back.

Or should we implicitly accept such usage of mesh as a possibility?

I originally posted this story on reddit, and there were some useful comments. Of course, some of those would centralize the mesh to unusable degree, and we probably shouldn't go that far. But I believe blacklist, whitelist and throttling of excessive traffic are valid mechanisms that need to be implemented in the nearest future in meshcore. There are already forks with those, so it's definitely doable.