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Subject: Global-Scale Distributed Storage Systems

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  • From: Adam Back <adam AT cypherspace.org>
  • To: weidai AT eskimo.com
  • Cc: bluesky AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: deployment vectors
  • Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2001 01:28:55 -0500



Wei wrote:
> [you could aim to design systems so that...] we can present the
> censors with a binary choice: either block the entire system or none
> of it.
>
> You can consider this as an argument for building a general purpose
> global-scale distributed storage system that happens to be
> censorship resistant, rather than one that's designed to be
> censorship resistant at the cost of efficiency. The latter will not
> become popular enough to make it too expensive to block entirely.

I was thinking about this before in earlier discussion on cypherpunks
and eternity.

This argument leads me to the conclusion that one should also examine
plans which involve very light weight security if even any, and just
build systems with other apparent intended properties, with carefully
engineered censorship resistant properties tied into them in hard to
remove ways. (Think lack of SMTP authentication in early SMTP
protocols -- that simple mistake allowed all the unwanted mail
problems, and weakened notions of the reliability of mail authorship
-- arguably a boon for anonymity in email).

So what pressing problems could one fix as a deployment vector to get
censor resistance: a good global flash-crowds and DDoS resistance
system which has some free decentralised peering system that makes it
essentially anarchic and uncontrolable as a virtue in it's method to
protect against flash-crowds.

(My argument is "you need distributed service to prevent against
distributed attacks" and "ultimately you can't distinguish between
popular content and a DDoS").

I'd also argue that it's not directly necessary to include reader
anonymity in the network, there are systems which do this separately,
ZKS freedom, anonymizer, etc. Although it may not be a bad thing to
try to do, and certainly making anonymity more widely deployed,
available and accessible to the masses is a good thing. My only
caution would be to avoid biting off too many hard problems at once.
Censor resistant content distribution is a hard enough problem by
itself without dragging in anonymous interactive communications which
has it's own overlapping but different complexities.

A distributed web space able to cope with flash-crowds seems like a
fairly killer app. Akamai try to provide high speed, some managed
monitoring, etc. but it's still one companies managed system.
Something isn't distributed and anarchic which we need for a couple of
reasons (censor resistance, and to get a large enough pool of
resources for flash-crowds) until it's run by everyone in a preferably
zero barrier to entry system, so anyone with resources can join, and
users can use, and ISPs have some reason to use it (eg. it reduces
load for the same reason as web caches).

Perhaps just a next generation mirroring system which uses a
reasonable automatic data migration and some simple DNS or otherwise
based pragmatic easy solution to lookup to convert names into
locations. DNS aggressive caching makes it's hierarchical nature less
of a problem for performance, though reserving the right to quickly
react to change reduces the cachine opportunities, and hierarchies are
bad for censor resistance.

Adam




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