[117986] in Cypherpunks
Re: request for information/virtual private network as
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (holist)
Fri Sep 17 03:04:33 1999
Message-Id: <3.0.6.32.19990916104031.007d4100@mail.elender.hu>
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 1999 10:40:31 +0200
To: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>,
"Michael J. Fromberger" <Fromberger@Clothing.Dartmouth.EDU>,
cypherpunks@toad.com
From: holist <holist@elender.hu>
In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.19990916093627.009cf240@idiom.com>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Reply-To: holist <holist@elender.hu>
>>> in which the database would be "doing
>>> sommersaults"
>
>I'm not sure the precise technical definition of "doing somersaults" (:-),
>but as long as you split the data appropriately, you need most of the pieces
>to reconstruct the originals. This means that you should do encryption
>on the separate pieces when you're sending them back and forth, though
>you can decide whether to do that as part of your protocols or just wrap
>the data in IPSEC.
let me try to phrase this more precisely.
my point is that while it may be easy for LE to bust say 500 servers around
the country, possibly even if a few of those were abroad, it would be very
difficult indeed to bust them all at the same time - at the very least, it
would take a thousand police officers, and with appropriate protection, a
great deal of resources. So if you had a software RAID (whatever that is)
with probabilistic, graceful degradation secret-sharing (this makes more
sense to me) which kept moving itself around a network, it would be very
difficult to find the data even if someone actually operating one of these
segments decides to do them in.
The database I have in mind is actually a content-provider and e-mail
system. It could also run information escrow services for its members. This
was one could reasonably expect that aside from massive government effort
(which is likely to break any feeble young organisation with a few hundred
members) and from the co-operative effort of most members (you could even
rig the amount of influence individual members have to the amount of work
they've put into the private web . both in terms of conent and in terms of
processing.
It would be necessary to use processing resource offered by people who are
only connected to the web temporarily - but I think a routine that handled
newcomers ought to handle this thing as well - no reason to know whether a
"newcomer" is actually new, or not - and if it did, there are signature
schemes I guess...
is this making any sense?
holist
>>It seems like you're basically describing a software RAID, where the
>>data are mirrored, but instead of mirroring literal copies, you mirror
>>shares of the data constructed using some secret-sharing scheme.
>>Would some variation of Shamir's linear-algebraic scheme work for this
>>purpose?
>
>
>>Of course, you'd have the problem that if one of your nodes bit the
>>dust, you'd be screwed, but then that's the point of encryption.
>
>The secret-sharing technology needs M out of N shares to reconstruct data,
>so you can set it up to recover from losing N-M sites - IF you know
>when you lose a site. If one of your sites merely has garbaged data,
>and you don't know which one, you could be badly hosed.
>Checksums are your friend.
> Thanks!
> Bill
>Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
>PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
>
>
