Markus Kuhn (on ukcrypto) discussing his PhD project: the design of an eternity file system with a distributed administration function system controlled via a cryptographically enforced digital constitution. Comments to follow. Adam ====================================================================== To: ukcrypto@maillist.ox.ac.uk Subject: Re: intangible definitions are hard to pin down Date: Thu, 19 Nov 1998 16:28:21 +0000 From: Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk> Ben Laurie wrote on 1998-11-19 12:22 UTC:
Ross Anderson wrote:
It will get worse. One of my students is developing a file system that can be spread over a WAN, so that for example you can force all file modifications in directory foo to be backed up automatially using a kind of RCS at a server in America. Useful stuff - real businesses are much more interested in backup and disaster recovery than they are in crypto (and spend a couple of orders of magnitude more money). But how does this sort of system interact with export control?
Cool - is this going to be open source?
Of course.
Presumably, even though, as you say, businesses are less interested in crypto, it will, nevertheless, use crypto for data protection and user authentication?
Of course. The main research aspect of this project is the joint administration of such distributed archives. For spam protection, you still need people who decide, which files are allowed on the distributed server infrastructure, and which are not. This administration is so far the weak link in the Eternity Service concept, because whoever decides that something is not spam takes over some responsibility for the content, and is therefore subject to legal power of national powers. The distributed administration in my system will be controlled via a sort of cryptographically enforced digital constitution (written in a tiny special purpose functional programming language) that determines administrative rights in a freely configurable way for a distributed server architecture (allowing elections, votes, vetoes, impeachment, updates to the constitution, etc.). This way, no single person will be responsible for the maintenance of such international software repositories, but a (usually international) group of democratically controlled volunteers does this. This way, US people can easily contribute to the administration of such distributed archives without having to share any legal responsibility for the fact that the archive also contains export controlled software, because the majority of administrators and not some single citizen alone has decided which files are allowed to use server space. The goal of this project is of course not primarily to by-pass export controls. It will hopefully advance the state-of-the-art of how we use the Internet to distribute information to a point where classical export control laws and national control of Internet content in general are led completely ad absurdum, without enabling at the same time the wide distribution and robust long-term storage of commonly considered despicable material such as child pornography, instructions for building weapons of mass destruction, or unwanted commercial advertising. In fact, by providing easy to configure governmental mechanisms comparable to those national governments are based on for software repositories, we distribute the responsibility in a cryptographically enforced way over the thousands or millions of users of such archives, effectively bypassing any control of national governments, without the negative aspects of complete anarchy (spam). To avoid misunderstandings: the ultimate idea is not to just by-pass national laws, but to offer a productive and democratic alternative technical means for controlling online resources, because the classical options of either national legislation and complete anarchy both have serious problems. Markus (Ross' student, who tries to get a PhD for developing a theoretical foundation and practical implementation of global-scale jointly administrated file spaces) -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>