It strikes me that the security stuff in the NoCat project answers a technical challenge more than a real need.

Not at all! Geez, after seeing the expensive and protocol-thrashing bloatware that covered this exact need at Networld+Interop last week, I kept thinking "someone's gonna do this is open source, I just hope it's not a kludge".

Simple example of why this would be great. I live in a suburb. I'm probably the alpha geek around here. A bunch of my neighbors don't want to sink big $$$ for a DSL line. I tell some of them "no problem, get a $100 wireless card and hook into mine". Maybe I want $25/month from them, maybe not. But I sure want to be sure I can tell who is using what bandwidth.

<rant>The most vocal security geeks push encryption much more strongly than they push authorization. This has caused common folks to think about privacy from snooping much more than about nicely limiting access to things they want to share but not give away. Common folks don't care nearly as much about snooping as they do about authorization.</rant>