Tim May wrote:
It is also likely in the extreme that a working Eternity service will quickly be hit with attackers of various sorts who want to test the limits of the service, or who want such services shut down.
Exactly. When I first talked about Eternity, which was at either the 1994 or 1995 protocols workshop, I was walking back to my seat when Bob Morris (then at the NSA) said, from behind his hand in a stage whisper, `Kiddyporn!' Adam Back added:
the spooks / feds have a history of posting their own child porn if none is available to seize
Indeed, and a decade or so ago there was a scandal when it turned out that the spooks were using the Kincora Boys' Home in Belfast as a pedo brothel in order to entrap various local politicians. For them to say now that they need key escrow to suppress Kiddyporn is a bit rich! However the main threat is the court order - Anton Pillar or whatever - and the best weapon against court orders is anonymity. If they don't know your address they can't serve you the order or arrest you for contempt. Tom Womack:
I can imagine *use* of the service becoming a felony
I mentioned in the paper that Mossad might deny Eternity service to the Muslim world by posting something rude about the Prophet Mohammed. One must of course create a lawful excuse for people to have Eternity software mounted on their system. Maybe in addition to the `public' Eternity service we should have many corporate or even private services, many of which have escrow capabilities and are thus clearly law-abiding and accountable :-) There are many other possibilities. One topic that oozes into my consciousness from time to time is that one might integrate covert communications and storage with an anti-spam mail program - maybe a natural way forward if Adam hides Eternity traffic in spam! Tim again:
Great idea, but where are the customers?
Some 90% of security research effort is on confidentiality, 9% on authenticity and 1% on availability. Corporate infosec expenditures are exactly the other way round, and tools to enable disaster recovery databases to be spread holographically over a company's PCs could save a fortune compared with the cost of some current arrangements. If a few of these backup resources have hidden directories that mount the public Eternity service, then who can tell? At the Info Hiding Workshop at Portland in April, I will present a new idea which may facilitate such implementations of Eternity. This is the Steganographic File System - designed to provide you with any file whose name and password you know. If you don't know this combination, then you can't even tell that the file is there. We do not need to make any assumptions about tamper resistance; it can be done using suitable mathematics. (This is joint work with Roger Needham and Adi Shamir.) Ross PS: we need a better word for `eternityspace', and Bell Labs have already trademarked `Inferno'. So what - Nirvana? Valhalla?