[107317] in Cypherpunks
Eternity implementation features wish list?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ryan Lackey)
Sun Jan 10 17:55:47 1999
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1999 18:44:12 -0400
From: Ryan Lackey <ryan@venona.com>
To: cypherpunks@algebra.com, gsstark@mit.edu, eternity@internexus.net
Cc: aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk, rja14@cl.cam.ac.uk
Reply-To: Ryan Lackey <ryan@venona.com>
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
[it's probably rude to post both to a list and to individuals and cc:
to other people without talking to the individuals involved first, but
I'd rather not have n separate conversations possibly get out of sync.
apologies in advance]
Recent events have caused me to very very much wish there were a working
Eternity system in place (losing my two primary hard drives in 6 months,
government crackdown on many kinds of information, etc.)
Also, today a friend of mine from university (Greg Stark) said he'd be
interested in a project to demonstrate his crypto/coding prowess, and to
do something useful.
For those who don't remember, I was working on Eternity DDS a while ago
when I realized an anonymous blinded cash system was needed to support
Eternity-service functionality, and then I disappeared to the Caribbean
to work on something which I can't really overtly reveal but which is
pretty obvious :)
For background information on Eternity, check out Ross Anderson's paper at:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/eternity/eternity.html
Adam Back's implementation using USENET:
http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/eternity
I had a page describing my take on how to implement it, and also some code
that never got released, but it was lost on my first hard drive failure in
late August 98.
Since it looks like I'll be spending a fair bit of time working on
something other than Eternity proper, I'm going to try to see if I
can get him to work on Eternity. The thing I'm working on will be quite
useful for an Eternity implementation, of course.
What I'd like to know is what functionality people would want from
an Eternity implementation written by someone who is actually a good
programmer with a bit of spare time right now :)
I'm prepared to offer Greg (or other people who are very interested and
who I can trust to play around on machines) access to machines, web space,
a domain, mailing lists, etc. I also am probably willing to chip in some
e-gold (http://www.e-gold.com/) to the effort -- it's coming out of my own
relatively poor pocket, so not very much. (if other people want to chip in
too, I'm sure it would help). Unfortunately I will have very
little time between now and fc99 (feb20) to work on anything but what I'm
working on right now, so realistically I can't help very much.
All of the code needs to be released under an opensource license (preferably
LGPL for the library part and GPL for the server, but something else would
be fine. If people were interested in publishing another paper about the
implementation of Ross Anderson's wonderful theoretical idea/ideal, I can
think of a few conferences which might be intersted, too.
Here's what I'm thinking as far as steps:
Version 0.1
- -----------
Accepts (key, data) over the network and spits back (data) in response to (key)
Should use some kind of vague standard like HTTP, maybe DAV extensions?
Ideally a java client is provided too so one can just give it an object
or serialized object and have it handle the storage.
Potentially it's worth adding an "ack" message, like a hash or signed hash
over (data) or (key, data), maybe this is 0.15
Version 0.2
- -----------
Some kind of payment protocol (key, data, coin) where coin gets spent in
time according to some formula. Coin might also be an account. (coin and
coin spent/test/etc. code will be provided by rdl with more news to come..
an opensource java library, ranging from either kind of dull and boring
through actually a fairly cool piece of code, depending on several issues)
Potential features for future versions (should be extensible to include...)
- ---------------
replication/distribution across eternity nodes
performance analysis/auditing by third parties to ensure performance on
contracts
computation/bandwidth too, supporting arbitrary code/execution in a java
sandbox on the server
steganographic file system support/functionality, where one enters a key
and a size and gets back either a file or random data, impossible to
determine which is which without the key
secure multiparty computation to split computation done by users of the
Eternity system across multiple servers to protect from monitoring by
the operators of eternity nodes
network protocols to prevent traffic analysis within the Eternity system --
pipenet, dcnet, etc.
multilevel storage architecture with near line storage, quality of service,
etc.
So, if there's interest, I think probably the eternity@internexus.net is
the ideal place to conduct any discussions, although cc:'ing to other
lists is always good.
Thanks,
Ryan
ryan@venona.com
(just generated a gpg key that will hopefully outlast the week this time...)
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v0.9.1 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org
iEYEARECAAYFAjaZLNsACgkQ7AUkXPewg8cICgCfW5C8h6VOPJykdWfAfU4vpit/
IrUAn333BP+RVsbHvyqkEp6DGoPMbFnV
=IB5T
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
