With regards to the history function, I recall seeing a paper (no idea where or what the title was) that looked at it a different way. The concern is that in a P2P environment, there's no central assumed tamper-proof central server. One must rely on the peers themselves for history. It would be relatively easy for a peer to simply erase and ignore bad history, or for peers to be able to collude to report false history, unless one of two things happens: 1. The vector/group concept of Advogato among others prevents collusion simply because there are no multple paths...the false history shows up as a self-referential structure and not as a web of trust links. The group/vector concept searches for multiple disjoint paths of trust, which lessens or destroys collusion. 2. That the history passed on by a peer should be serialized in such a way that it is tamper-proof. That is, the client can't selectively delete events from the history. For instance, a one-way accumulator-type function intertwined into the data performs the protection. It doesn't circumvent the possibility of a client simply deleting the last few events in the history (and nothing is going to stop a client from doing a snapshot to achieve this), but it at least makes such selective editting an all-or-nothing function. _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers@zgp.org http://zgp.org/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers _______________________________________________ Here is a web page listing P2P Conferences: http://www.neurogrid.net/twiki/bin/view/Main/PeerToPeerConferences ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]