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Subject: Global-Scale Distributed Storage Systems

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  • From: Stephen Blackheath <stephen AT blacksapphire.com>
  • To: "Global-Scale Distributed Storage Systems" <bluesky AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>, Adam Back <adam AT cypherspace.org>
  • Subject: Re: how to do censorship resistance (Re: Grapevine Technical Overview)
  • Date: Tue, 28 May 2002 09:53:48 +1200


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Adam,

Freenet sort of works this way. Grapevine has more of a "fortress"
mentality, the idea being that this is a "cheaper" way of preserving
anonymity (i.e. without cost to efficiency). It does mean that Grapevine
could suffer from "long-term colonisation" (or "siege"). This does not
invalidate the idea - it just changes the design parameters (we have
efficiency to trade off while others don't). Of course the point of this
exercise is to try different approaches and see how they work. It's too
early for every project to choose the "best" strategy.


Steve

On Tue, 28 May 2002 07:17, Adam Back wrote:
> Graydon Hoare's symptomatic file system proposes a solution to the
> censorship problem: a node is used only once, and is not advertised
> until a replacement node is in place.
>
> In this way, once you've found the content it has moved, so you never
> learn information allowing you to censor information.
>
> The downside is the overhead of the churn this will introduce.
>
> Adam
>
> On Mon, May 27, 2002 at 09:12:45PM +0200, Oskar Sandberg wrote:
> > On Mon, May 27, 2002 at 08:11:48PM +0200, melc AT fashionvictims.com wrote:
> > > I've been thinking about the design of anonymous/censorship-resistant
> > > file storage systems (like grapevine) and it seems to me that there is
> > > a problem with this kind of plausible deniability.
> >
> > Yes, you are right. Regimes could easily publish blacklists of key
> > values nodes are not allowed to handle requests for - and implementing
> > the functionality to censor data based on those lists would be left to
> > (read: forced on) the node operator.
> >
> > However, they are really more likely to simply outlaw systems like this
> > all together. The whole plausible deniability thing is a joke, it's like
> > claiming you are innocent because you closed your eyes while firing a
> > machine gun in a crowd (or in this case, more like claiming you are
> > innocent of thought crime because you closed your eyes while speaking
> > banned words...)
> >
> > <>
> >
> > > Is there a way to foil this kind of attack?
> >
> > Keep the very existence of the nodes private. That is easier said then
> > done.
>
> ---
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