From: Black Unicorn <unicorn@schloss.li>

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A. Methods to run secure websites on insecure servers. [...] A software solution which permits local decryption makes traffic analysis less useful, presents the opportunity to use front end and disposable www pages on domestic ISPs while imposing no liability on the ISP itself, and opens several more effective traffic analysis deterants.

I don't quite understand what is being proposed here. If the information on the web site is encrypted, who is supposed to be able to decrypt it? Just one person, or some select group of people? My concern is the difficulty of keeping keys secret if they are made available to more than one or two people.

Once the keys are known to those who would oppose the publication of the information they can go to the ISP just as easily as if the information were not encrypted, and get them to take it down if it is illegal.

It would seem that an equally effective method would be to use no encryption, but just a secret URL, one which is not linked to from elsewhere - an "island in the net", so to speak (apologies to Bruce Sterling).

Hal

I was concerned with an entirely different problem really. Given the assumption that you and three of your best friends wish to use WWW to share information, how can you do so without exposing the page to the ISP? Today, as far as I know, if you wish to hide what you have on a page you have to control the server. If you wish to try and deter traffic analysis you have to own the servers in front of the server. Cumbersome, expensive and still not entirely effective. If instead you could prevent the owner of the server from reading the stuff in the first place, while allowing it to be read at leasure by the users... It would also be much easier to construct remailer type proxies in that each server in the chain would be denied the content of data passing through. What I am hoping can be done is to stretch the points in "point to point encryption" out past the ISP. Now, if your concern is exposure by a member you have given access to the webpage, the discussion becomes an issue of certification, and signatures. An important point, but something of an overkill where the ISP has full access to your webpage whatever your passwords might be. Create a page where the data is locally encrypted, and which only accepts connections from valid certificates and you go a long way to being able to communicate via WWW securely even over insecure channels. You also free up the method to those who don't have time, or cannot afford to run their own WWW server. If the location of your page is exposed, so what? Spend the $11 a month to open a page on another ISP. In the "island on the net" example, you have to reroute the entire deal. In addition, you have now eliminated what must be the number 1 problem in running an "iffy" page. ISP intereference. You have removed their liability. How were they supposed to know what it was you were doing? They don't have the keys. Now if you really wanted to be slick about it, you would use a form of encryption to multiple users option and encrypt the page to the public keys of individuals. Sure, they could release the keys and spill the beans, but they would be compromising their own keys in the process. Mileage on this deterant will vary according to what they may have done with the key beforehand, and it requires a multiple purpose to those keys (as with PGP).