[liberationtech] Fw: Concept for takedown-resistant publishing
Daniel Margo
dmargo at eecs.harvard.edu
Thu Feb 2 17:02:37 PST 2012
Let me try to explain what is and isn't technically difficult about this
idea. Feel free to pass it around. I have cc'd the liberationtech list.
Torrent is an open protocol. There are numerous open source torrent
libraries. Opera can download torrents natively, for Firefox there are
extensions to do this, and so far as I know every browser has some kind of
plug-able framework for MIME type (Internet media type) handling. To have a
browser download and then open a torrent of a page is totally realistic,
and probably not that much code.
The problem is that this is not the actual technical challenge. The actual
challenges are these:
1. Name resolution: How do I find the torrent file, and then the P2P cloud
itself?
2. Updates: How do I share a Web site as a living, updating document?
3. Server backend: Is it realistic to run a modern Web site without a
client-server relationship?
1. Name resolution comes in two parts: finding the torrent file, and then
finding the actual P2P cloud. Web sites like The Pirate Bay function as
name resolution services for finding torrent files, but obviously any
single such server can be blocked. What I presume we actually desire is a
name resolution service just like DNS for Web sites: you type in a URL, it
gets resolved to a torrent file.
URLs have a hostname and a path, e.g.
"www.hostname.com/path/to/torrent.file". "www.hostname.com" is resolved by
DNS to a server, and then "/path/to/torrent.file" is resolved by that
server. So unfortunately, you don't gain any takedown resistance by
hosting your torrent file at "www.myserver.com/my.torrent", because if
"www.myserver.com" is taken down, then "/my.torrent" can't be resolved. So
what you would actually need is for DNS to provide hostname resolution
directly into torrents. This is a sweet idea, but changing DNS is hard.
Even if you could do that, well, what's in a "torrent file"? A torrent
file contains information to get you joined into the P2P cloud;
specifically, it contains the address of a tracker, a central server that
gates entry into the cloud. If the tracker is down or blocked by some
technology, you can't enter the cloud. This is primarily a weakness of the
BitTorrent protocol, and not the idea itself; there are extensions to
BitTorrent and other P2P protocols that are resilient to this weakness. But
fundamentally, finding your way into the P2P cloud is an act of name
resolution to find other peers in the cloud, which is most easily done by a
name resolution server, in this case the tracker. If we're going about
making changes to DNS, probably the most technically sane (but politically
unrealistic) solution would be for DNS itself to provide tracking
capability for the cloud. Again, that is a sweet idea, but changing DNS is
hard.
I don't mean to suggest these issues are insurmountable, merely that this
is the actual Hard Part.
2. In order to support dynamic content there has to be a cryptographic
distinction between updates coming from the legitimate publisher of the
site (Alice), and subterfuge coming from Evil Eve. Cryptographic
authentication might be authenticated by the data being shared (e.g. this
data is signed by Alice, and everybody knows her signature) or by the P2P
network itself (e.g. in addition to sharing the torrent, the servers also
provide a distributed authentication service that will only accept updates
signed by Alice). I am by no means an expert on this subject, so I will
refrain from talking about it extensively, but I bring it up merely because
cryptography is non-optional for any dynamic scheme, and I'm not aware of
any update-able, cryptographically-secured P2P torrents. It sounds like
maybe they should exist? It also sounds Hard, and Google isn't turning
anything up.
Again, I'm not suggesting these issues are insurmountable; in some sense
Google Docs does all this. But they do it with a pretty sophisticated
backend that glues many technologies together (I guarantee Google has a
killer internal name resolution and authentication service), and I have no
idea how Hard it would be to make those parts takedown-resistant (in the
sense that there are no central servers. There are unquestionably central
servers at Google).
3. The real elephant in the room is that modern Web sites are best thought
of as programs, not files, and program distribution is infinitely harder
than file distribution. When you visit a Wordpress blog, what you appear to
receive is an HTML file: but in actuality that HTML was streamed by a PHP
script running on the server talking to a MySQL database. The number of
layers in this onion is arbitrary; it's anything you could run on a
computer. Arbitrary code, or I could hook MSPaint up to the thing if I
wanted it enough. Distributing *and executing* arbitrary code like this is
Quite Possibly Impossible, and if it is possible it is Very Far Away. At
any rate, BitTorrent can't do this.
The word "arbitrary" is important. In specific cases, you can certainly
find a case-specific resolution. Diaspora is building something like a
distributed social network "program", and I do honestly believe that with a
lot of code and hard thinking, you could distribute a Wordpress blog's
backend on P2P. It would probably require a total rewrite of Wordpress such
that it wouldn't even be the same piece of software, and you would have to
solve the other Hard Problems above, but I think it is technically possible
at this time. But in the general case, you might have more luck working
towards a Singularity and then asking the Machine-Gods for an answer.
What seems more realistic to me is taking snapshots of a Web site and
distributing those as files instead, rather than trying to distribute the
actual Web site program. That's why we designed Mirror As You Link to work
that way.
These are all the hard issues I can think of, as a technical person with
some distributed systems background. There may be others, since in some
cases we're really exploring uncharted waters here.
- Daniel Margo
On 02/02/2012 10:40 AM, Kendra Albert wrote:
> Some interesting stuff
>
> ---
> Kendra Albert
>
> Research Assistant to Jonathan Zittrain
> Berkman Center for Internet and Society
> Harvard University
>
> Forwarded message:
>
>> *From:* Jonathan Zittrain <zittrain at law.harvard.edu>
>> *To:* Rob Faris <rfaris at cyber.law.harvard.edu>
>> *Cc:* emstark at gmail.com, Kendra Albert
>> <kalbert at cyber.law.harvard.edu>, Alicia Solow-Niederman (Google Docs)
>> <asolowniederman at gmail.com>
>> *Date:* Wednesday, February 1, 2012 6:08:49 PM
>> *Subject:* Re: Fwd: [liberationtech] Concept for takedown-resistant
>> publishing
>>
>> thanks
>>
>> At UTC-5 03:51 PM 2/1/2012, Rob Faris wrote:
>>> I have no idea if this has any merit - but think of you when I see
>>> content mirroring.
>>>
>>>
>>> -------- Original Message --------
>>> Subject: [liberationtech] Concept for takedown-resistant publishing
>>> Date: Wed, 01 Feb 2012 21:49:42 +0100
>>> From: Fabio Pietrosanti (naif) <lists at infosecurity.ch>
>>> <mailto:lists at infosecurity.ch>
>>> To: liberationtech at lists.stanford.edu
>>> <mailto:liberationtech at lists.stanford.edu>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> with a brainstorming with various persons it went out an idea of a
>>> concept of a takedown-resistat publishing system for website.
>>>
>>> I'm writing here to submit the concept idea to contribution/critics,
>>> maybe someone will do it someday (if feasible).
>>>
>>> I tried to abstract two concept:
>>>
>>> a) What is a website?
>>> A website is a set of information (text/images) that can be accessed by
>>> a user trough a web browser.
>>>
>>> b) What do you need to be takedown-resistant?
>>> Have a lot of mirrors, on as many server as possible around the globe.
>>>
>>> c) How do you make a lot of mirror available?
>>> By making use a very simple and diffused technology for the mirroring,
>>> possibly something that's already diffused across a lot of users.
>>>
>>> d) Which is the most known/used information distribution/mirroring
>>> system used nowday?
>>>
>>> Bittorrent P2P system.
>>> Bittorrent is the system that today is most used to do file-sharing,
>>> de-facto spreading, distributing, mirroring files.
>>> Bittorrent software is widely available and heavily diffused among
>>> users.
>>>
>>> So, if it would be possible to let a browser easily access the content
>>> available on bittorrent, it would be possible to easily create a
>>> scalable, distributed and resistant network of mirrors capable of
>>> resisting takedown.
>>>
>>> Obviously this require:
>>> - That the content on bittorrent should be file containing all the
>>> elements of the website glued together
>>> - That the web browser should have capability to access a such content
>>> on Bittorrent
>>>
>>> I am not entering into the technological discussion, if it's feasible or
>>> not feasible (maybe not, maybe yes).
>>>
>>> As a concept, what do you think? Other ideas/extensions?
>>>
>>> -naif
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