eternity-lite (was Re: The War is Underway (fwd))

[Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk>]

Lucky Green <shamrock@netcom.com> writes:
> No offense, but Adam's "Eternity" system doesn't come close to Ross
> Anderson's original design. It is a fun weekend hack, but calling it the
> Eternity Service is a very unfortunate choice of words. It isn't any more
> Ross Anderson's Eternity Service than type I remailers are Chaumian mixes.

I wholeheartedly agree that it's current form is no where close to
Ross A's Eternity Service.  My hope was that by giving something
concrete to criticize we might see some progress in the direction of
Ross's ideal.  Perhaps eternity-lite would be a better name (I nearly
released it with this name).

I was hoping for some specific criticisms, analyses, suggestions etc.
Having a functioning example would probably help, I hope to get one up
soonish, time permitting.  Some of the aspects of Ross's system are
quite hard to acheive, while what I have is pretty easy to acheive (as
demonstrated by the few hours it took me to get it where it is).

Type I remailers came before mixmaster.  Bass-o-matic came before
replacement with IDEA, etc.  We still don't have a DC net, nor a
pipenet.


One consideration of the design, is a social aspect, the servers
design is partly attempting to bootstrap acceptability from something
which has come to be viewed as a fact of life: the inherently noisy
and uncontrollable nature of alt USENET newsgroups.  By designing
something which is in essence a search engine, I speculate that the
individual server operators would be less liable than if they part of
the distributed database as is the case with Ross's Eternity Service.
There are specific exemptions for caches in some legislation (I
think), and anyway you can turn cacheing off.  Search engines have
similarly to my knowledge been left out of the censorship argument.
The interesting aspect is how censors would react when they bumped
into documents hosted by this system.  By basing it on USENET, the
hope is to direct censorship attempts at USENET itself, which has
proven very resilient to attack.  (Cancel messages I'll discuss in my
response to Paul Bradley, who raised this question).

One aspect of my system which has not been implemented yet is fetching
articles from news archival and search services such as dejanews and
altavista.  This would be useful to reduce the bandwidth overhead of
having to re-post pages just to keep up with

I tried a few experiments to see if this was feasible, and discovered
a few things which will affect the design.  The design requires lookup
by SHA1 hash of virtual URL.  

Firstly neither search engine will search for hex numbers over a
certain length.  The search engines have some indexing mechanism, I
presume they have a rejection criteria to remove mime strings etc
clogging up the word index, it specifically rejects long hex strings,
I'm not sure what the cut-off is.  Both seem to search for decimal
numbers of somewhat longer length.  Neither will search decimal
numbers of sufficient length to represent a SHA1 hash directly.  The
solution to this seems to be to encode as space separated groups of
sufficiently short numbers and use a search AND to find them.

Secondly (!) one of them explicitly states that they do not archive
uuencoded data.  However it does archive PGP mime'd data (currently),
perhaps to allow for PGP signatures, or perhaps uuencode alone was
targetted as the most common by volume.

The PGP data archiving would likely change if the eternity posts
volume got significant enough to draw the attention of the news
archives.

If/when this came about, something like texto (primitive textual stego
program available on the net somewhere) would probably be sufficient
to fool the search engine.  (Bill Frantz suggested stego for this
purpose in a recent purpose).

Paul Bradley provided some critisisms, and someone else in email,
which I'll respond to next.

Adam
-- 
Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/

print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`