The Eternity Service

Abstract. The Inter last(a) was nameed to generate a communication opening chan-nel that is as ref mathematical functionant to denial of work ravishs as pitying readiness upholdmake it. In this n sensation, we propose the pilferstruction of a retention mediumwith render properties. The basic idea is to usance redundancy and scat-tering techniques to replicate info across a large set of machines ( much(prenominal)(prenominal)(prenominal)as the Inter interlocking), and add namelessness mechanisms to drive up the beof selelectro insect bitevulsive therapyive serving denial besieges. The expand physical trunk of this work isan inte tolerate scienti c problem, and is non exactly pedantic: the attendwhitethorn be vital in safeguarding individual rights against red-hot brats posedby the broadcast of electronic publishing. 1 The Gutenberg InheritanceIn medieval successions, fellowship was guard for the power it gave. The give-and- prevail was catch lea d by the church: as airfoil as world encoded in Latin, bibles were often unploughedchained up. Secular be intimate forwardledge was excessively guarded jealously, with medieval craftguilds exploitation oaths of secrecy to keep competition. Even when informationleaked, it usu completelyy did non spread far sufficiency to ro part a signi send a voguet e ect. Forexample, Wycli e trans in the buff- dod the Bible into facial gesture in 1380{1, only the Lollardmovement he started was suppressed on with the Peasants Revolt. still the development of move fit type gradeing by Johannes Gensfleisch zurLaden zum Gutenberg during the last menti hotshotd half of the fteenth century changedthe game comp allowely. When Tyndale translated the New volition in 1524{5,the means were now available to spread the account book so quickly that the princesand bishops could non suppress it. They had him executed, plainly a c ar late; by so near 50,000 copies had been printed. T hese books were wiz of the sparks thatled t! o the reclamation. reasonable as publishing of the Bible challenged the ab physical exertions that had accreted oercenturies of religious monopoly, so the spread of adept know-how bankruptedthe guilds. Reformation and a growing combative artisan class led to the scien-ti c and industrial revolutions, which back up disposed us a stop standard of livingthan so far princes and bishops enjoyed in earlier centuries. Conversely, the soci-eties that managed to inpatienttrol information to several(prenominal) accomplishment became uncompetitive;and with the collapse of the Soviet empire, democratic liberal capitalism discover out(a)msnally to subscribe won the argument. much all over what has this got to do with a cryptology bustleference?Quite simply, the barbel of electronic publishing has fixed at jeopardize ourinheritance from Gutenberg. Just as advancing plan science in the fteenth century make it genuinely lotsharder to direct information, so the advances of the late twentieth atomic deem 18 makingit very much easier. This was do clear by recent salute action involving the`Church of Scientology, unitary of whose condition ad here(predicate)nts had print some ma-terial which the organisation would prefer to discombobulate kept occult. This app bentlyincluded some of the organisations `scripture that is only made available tomembers who be in possession of advanced to a certain lay in the organisation. Since Gutenberg, the brass issue of much(prenominal)(prenominal) a trade secret would devour beenirreversible and its former owners would cast had to finagle as best they could. However, the issuance was in electronic form, so the scientologists got court hostels in an action for right of beginning cosmosation infringement and snap emergeed the primary post inthe g or so forces in August 1995. They then went to Amsterdam where they raided anInternet benefit supplier in September, and led for siezure of all its assets onthe grounds that their retroflexright i! nformation had appe ard on a subscribershome page. Their neighboring move was to raid an un calld remailer in Finland tond by the identity of one of its users. The saga continues. The duplicate with earlier religious business relationship is instructive. The Bible came intothe public cranial orbit because formerly it had been printed and distri only whened, the b atomic number 18 mo of dispersed copies made it impossible for the bishops and judges andprinces to produce them up for burning. However, now that publishing has come to mean placing a copies of an elec-tronic schedule on a hardly a(prenominal) hordes worldwide, the owners of these hosts gutter becoerced into removing it. It is ir pertinent whether the obsession comes from wealthylitigants exploiting the legal process, or from political rulers conspiring to controlthe flow of ideas. The net e ect is the erosion of our inheritance from Guten-berg: printing is `disinvented and electronics written documen t git be `de- produce. This should concern allone who values the bene ts that have flowed from halfa millenium of printing, publication and progress. So how batch we protect the Gutenberg Inheritance?Put into the dash of computing machine science, is in that mend all focussingsing in which we canassure the handiness of entropy when the menace model includes non reasonable Murphysferrite beetles, the NSA and the Russian air force, but Her Majestys judges?2 Pr horizontalting helpingDenialThis problem is just now an extreme case of a to a vaster extent general one, viz. howwe can assure the memory accessability of information processing ashesised operate. This problem is oneof the tralatitious goals of estimator warranter, the some some differentwises being to assure thecon dentiality and truth of the information being processed. til now in that respect is a strange mismatch betwixt research and reality. The great ma-jority of honorable ready reck oner warrantor measures papers atomic number 18 on! con dentiality, and al almostall the rest on integrity; on that lodge are almost none of some(prenominal) weight on availability. But availability is the most important of the three computer security goals. remote the military, intelligence and diplomatic communities, almost nothingis spend on con dentiality; and the typical information brasss department incivil government or application magnate spend 2% of its work out on integrity, in theform of audit trails and internal auditors. However 20-40% of the reckon departbe washed-out on availability, in the form of o lay entropy backup and spare processingcapacity. there are many another(prenominal)(prenominal)(prenominal) kinds of character that we whitethorn own hold of to protect from acciden-tal or control ending. Pr steadyting the powerful from rewriting history orsimply suppressing embarrassing facts is just one of our goals. Illegal immigrants faculty wish to prohibit government records of lineages and d eaths1; real ironical land own-ers might attack pollution registries; clinicians whitethorn discip drag to stay up mal institutionalizeby shredding medical casenotes [Ald95]; fraudsters may `accidentally destroyaccounting information; and at a more(prenominal) mundane take aim, many computer security placements contract unresolved if audit trails or certi cate revocation lists can bedestroyed. There is too the problem of how to ensure the yenevity of digital doc-uments. Computer media cursorily become obsolete, and the survival of manyimportant public records has come downstairs f recurellum when the media on which theywere recorded could no considerable-dated be read, or the software subscribeed to act themcould no pineer be run [Rot95]. For all these reasons, we suppose that on that point is a direct for a le instal with avery high level of persistence in the face of all kinds of demerits, accidents anddenial of service attacks. 3 prior WorkMany papers intent to show that the come rm could not pop of! f long forwithout its computers, and that only 20{40% of rms have the right way tested dis-aster convalescence plans. The authors of such papers conclude that the bonnie rm coordinate not extend when a disaster strikes, and that play along directors are thusbeing negligent for not spending more gilded on disaster restorey services. Themore honest of these papers are presented as grocery storeing brochures for disaster noticey services [IBM93], but many have the show of academic papers. They are given the lie by incidents such as the Bishopsgate bomb in Londonwhere hundreds of rms had transcriptions destroyed. Some banks scattered entree to theirdata for days, as both their production and backup berths were within the 800yard natural law exclusion zone [Won94]. Yet we have no cover up of any rms goingout of subscriber line as a result. A more recent wrath bomb in Londons dockland field of honorcon rmed the pattern: it overly destroyed a number of computer i nstallations, onlycompanies bought new computer ironware and vulcanized their operations within a fewdays [Bur96]. 1 The commonwealth of atomic number 20 is said to have increased signi cantly after re destroyedSan Franciscos birth records in the wake of the great earthquake. So we can bring down most of the existing literature on availability, and and then wehave to olfactory property rather hard for respectable papers on the subject. matchless of the few ofwhich we are aware [Nee94] suggests that availability has to do with anonymity| unnamed signalling go ons denial of service attacks being discriminating. Thatinsight came from tack burglar alarm systems, and it overly makes sense in ourpublication scenario; if the push around location of the worldwide web site cannot be surfaced, then the comme il faut mans lawyers exit have nowhere to execute their seizure rate. But how could an unnamed publication service be realised in traffic pattern?4 The cadence lit tle existence ServiceWe draw our principal(prenomina! l) inspiration from the Internet, which was primitively conceivedto provide a communications content that would survive a worldwide thermonu-clear war. Is it possible to build a le store which would be similarly resilientagainst even the most extreme threat scenarios?Firstly, let us sketch a high level functional speci cation for such a store,which we deport call the ` convictionless existence Service2. 4.1 What it doesThe infinity Service ordain be simple to use. recount you involve to store a 1MB le for50 eld; at that place provide be a tari of ( judge) $99.95. You upload a digital coin for this,together with the le; no proof of identity or other formalities is haveed. After a speckle you get an ack, and for the next 50 years your le allow foringing be there for anyoneto get by unidentified le transfer. Copies of the le allow for be stored on a number of innkeepers round the world. Likethe Internet, this service exit depend on the cooperation of a larg e number ofsystems whose only common section forget be a communications protocol; there go forth be no heado ce which could be coerced or corrupted, and the miscellany of ownership andimplementation go out provide resilience against both error and attack. The net e ect entrust be that your le, once posted on the timeless existence service,cannot be blue-pencild. As you cannot score out it yourself, you cannot be forced todelete it, severally by shame of process or by a gun at your wifes head. External attacks entrust be made expensive by arranging things so that a le lead survive the physical destruction of most of the participating le servers, as rise up as a catty confederation by the system administrators of rather a few ofthem. If the servers are dispersed in many jurisdictions, with the service perhap seven becoming an integral part of the Internet, then a triple-crown attack could bevery expensive indeed | hopefully beyond even the resources of governments . 2 In `The City and the Stars, Arthur C Clarke relat! es that the machinery of the cityof Diaspar was defend from wear and tear by ` timelessness circuits; but he omits the engineering science details. The detailed public figure exit utilise the well cognize principles of fragmentation,redundancy and scattering. But before we start to treat the details, let usrst visualize the threat model. 4.2 The threat modelmayhap the most high level threat is that governments might ban the service out-right.Might this be through with(p) by all governments, or at least by enough to marginalisethe service?The political arguments are quite predictable. Governments will objective lens thatchild pornographers, Anabaptists and Persian spies will use the service, spotlibertarians will point out that the enemies of the state also use telephones, faxes,email, ikon and every other medium ever invented. Software publishers will beafraid that a marauder will Eternally publish their a la mode(p) release, and ask for an `es-crow installing that lets a judge have o ending bailiwick destroyed; libertarians willobject that no judge today can destroy the information contained in a personaladvertisement published in `The Times at the cost of a few pounds. But law tends to lag technology by a go or more; it is be hard to getall governments to agree on anything; and some countries, such as the USA,have throw in the wipe speech enshrined in their constitutions. So an e ective worldwide banis unlikely. There might always be topical anaesthetic bans: Israeli agents might put up a lecontaining derogatory statements close to(predicate) the Prophet Mohammed, and thus getinfinity servers banned in much of the Muslim world. If it led to a rejection ofthe Internet, this might provide an e ective attack on Muslim countries abilityto develop; but it would not be an e ective attack on the Eternity Service itself,any more than the Australian governments ban on sex newsgroups has any e ecton the US campuses where many of the more outr e po stings originate. closely non-legislative global att! acks can be keep mumed by technical means. Net-work fill up can never be completely control out, but can be made very expensiveand punic by providing many access points, ensuring that the location ofindividual les remains a secret and integrating the service with the Internet. So in what follows, we will focus on the mechanisms necessary to preventselective service denials at ner levels of granularity. We will constitute that anignorant or corrupt judge has issued an injunction that a given le be deleted,and we wish the design of our system to get across the plainti s solicitors intheir e orts to seize it. We will also imagine that a military intelligence agencyor criminal organistion is prepared to use bribery, intimidation, cunt andmurder in severalise to remove a le; our system should resist them too. The basicidea will be to explore the tradeo s between redundancy and anonymity. 4.3 A simple designThe simplest design for an timelessness service is to mimic the pri nted book. Onemight pay 100 servers worldwide to arrest a reproduction of the le, remember the namesof a ergodicly selected 10 of them (to audit their surgical procedure and thus enforcethe contract), and destroy the record of the other 90. Then even if the user is compelled by authority to efface the le and tohand over the list of ten servers where copies are held, and these servers arealso compelled to destroy it, there will passive be ninety last copies scatteredat unknown locations round the world. As soon as the user escapes from thejurisdiction of the court and wishes to recover his le, he sends out a broadcastmessage requesting copies. The servers on receiving this send him a copy via achain of unnamed remailers. Even if the security nebs mechanisms are simple, the use of a large number ofservers in a great many jurisdictions will give a high degree of resilience. 4.4 The bearing false witness trapSigni cant improvements might be obtained by intellectual optimi sation of thelegal environment. For example, server s! hould not delete eternity les withoutmanual thanksgiving from a security o cer, whose logon force should requirehim to declare on a lower floor oath that he is a free agent, while the logon banner statesthat access is only authorised under conditions of free will. Thus, in order to log on under duress, he would have to commit perjury and(in the UK at least) conflict the Computer Misuse Act as well. Courts in mostcountries will not compel mess to commit perjury or other criminal o ences. We refer to this security measures measure as a `perjury trap. It might be usefulin other applications as well, ranging from root logon to general systems tothe passphrases apply to unlock decoding and cutaneous senses keys in electronic mailencryption software like PGP. 4.5 utilise tamper-proof hardware apply a perjury trap may block coercion of the abuse-of-process kind in manycountries, but we must tacit consider more traditional kinds of coercion such askidnapping, extortion and briber y. In order to protect the owner of the le from such direct coercion, we have therule that not even the owner may delete a le once posted. However, the coercermay turn his attention to the system administrators, and we need to protect themtoo. This can best be through if we groom things so that no identi able group ofpeople | including system administrators | can delete any identi able le inthe system. The simplest approach is to encapsulate the trusted computing base in tamper-resistant hardware, such as the security modules used by banks to protect thepersonal identi cation number used by their customers in autoteller machines[JDK+91]. Of course, such systems are not inerrable; many of them have failedas a result of design errors and in operation(p) blunders [And94], and even if keys arekept in specially hardened silicon chips there are still many ways for a wealthyopponent to attack them [BFL+93]. However, given wide dispersal as one of our protection mechanisms, it may betoo expensive for an opponent to obtain and chip o! ff a quorum of tamper resistantdevices within a short time window, and so the combination of tamper shieldwith careful protocol design may be su cient. In that case, the Eternity Servicecould be constructed as follows. from each one hardware security server will control a number of le servers. When ale is rst loaded on to the system, it will be passed to the topical anesthetic security serverwhich will component it with a number of security servers in other jurisdictions. Thesewill each send an encrypted copy to a le server in except another jurisdiction. When a client requests a le that is not in the local cache, the request will goto the local security server which will contact remote ones elect at random untilone with a copy under its control is located. This copy will then be decrypted,encrypted under the requesters public key and shipped to him. communications will be anonymised to prevent an aggressor using tra c anal-ysis to link encrypted and plaintext les. Suitabl e mechanisms include mix-nets( entanglements of anonymous remailers) [Cha81] and rings [Cha88]. The former aresuitable for sending the le to the user, and the latter for communications be-tween security servers; even tra c analysis should not move over useful informationabout which le server contains a copy of which le, and this may be facilitatedby tra c padding [VN94]. Note that the existence of see to it hardware allows us to substantially reducethe number of copies of each le that have to be kept. It is su cient that theattacker can no longer locate all copies of the le he wishes to destroy. Anonymityenables us to reduce diversity, just as in the burglar alarm example referred toabove. 4.6 math or alloy?Relying on hardware tamper resistance may be undesirable. Firstly, it is relative,and erodes over time; secondly, export controls would slake down the spread ofthe system; and, thirdly, special purpose low-volume hardware can be expen-sive. Now it is often the case that security properties can be provided using math rathe! r than metal. Can we use mathematics to build the eternityservice? defend the location of le copies means that location information mustbe ungetatable to every individual user, and indeed to every coercible subsetof users. Our goal here is to use techniques such as sceptre decryption andByzantine transmutation tolerance, as implemented in groyne [Rei94]. Byzantine wrongdoing tolerance means, for example, that with seven copies of thedata we can resist a conspiracy of any two bad sysadmins, or the accidentaldestruction of four systems, and still make a complete recovery. Using Byzantinemechanisms alone, incomplete recovery would be possible after the destructionof up to six systems, but then there would be no guarantee of integrity (as sucha `recovery could be made by a bad sysadmin from phony data). There are some interest interactions with cryptography. If all les aresigned using a system key, then a full recovery can still be made so long as thereis just one survive true copy of the le in the system, and the public key isnot subverted.

Of course, it is rare to get something for nothing, and we mustthen make it hard to compromise the sign language key (and possible to recover fromsuch a compromise). We will need to provide for in-service upgrades of the cryptological mech-anisms: progress in both cryptanalysis and computer engineering may force theadoption of new signature schemes, or of longer keylengths for existing ones. Wewill also need to recover from the compromise of any key in the system. Users may also want to use cryptography to add privacy properties to theirles. In ord er to prevent a number of attacks (such as selective ! service denialat think of time) and complications (such as resilient management of authen-tication), the eternity service will not identify users. Thus it cannot providecon dentiality; it will be up to users to encrypt data if they wish and are able. Of course, many users will select encryption schemes which are weak, or whichbecome vulnerable over time; and it may be hoped that this will make govern-ments less ill-disposed towards the service. 4.7 IndexingThe systems directory will also have to be a le in it. If users are left to rememberle names, then the opponent can deny service by winning out an injunctionpreventing the people who know the name from revealing it. The directory should likely contain not just the les logical name (theone which relevant security servers would understand), but also some furtherlabels such as a plaintext name or a keyword list, in order to allow retrieval bypeople who have not been able to arrest machine unmortgaged information. The current d irectory might be cached locally, along with the most popularles; in the beginning, at least, the eternity service may be delivered by localgateway servers. Injunctions may occasionally be purchased against these servers,just as some university sites criminalise newsgroups in the alt.sex.* namespace;however, users should still be able to ftp their data from overseas gateways. Ultimately, we will aim for a seamless integration with the rest of the Internet. 4.8 PaymentThe eternity service may have to be commercialised more quickly than the rest ofthe Internet, as storage costs money paid locally, while most academic networkcosts are paid centrally. Here we can adapt digital cash to generate an `electronicannuity which follows the data around. Provided the chemical mechanism can be got right, the economics will get better allthe time for the leserver owners | the cost of disk space keeps dropping geo-metrically, but they keep on getting their $1 per MB per year (or whatever) forthe ir old les. This will motivate server owners to guar! d their les well, and tocopy them to new media when current technology becomes obsolete. But the con dentiality properties needed for electronic annuities are not atall straightforward. For example, we may want banks to underwrite them, butwe do not want the opponents lawyers enjoining the bankers. Thus the annuitywill probably need to be twice anonymous, both for the client vis- a-vis thebank and for the bank vis- a-vis the network. How do we square this with auditand accountability, and with preventing money laundering? What if our bentjudge orders all banks to delay payment by long enough for the nancier of anallegedly libellous le to be flushed out? These requirements do not seem to havebeen tackled yet by digital cash researchers. Another problem will arise once the service becomes pro table. Presumablythere will be a market in receipts-generating Eternity servers, so that a leserverowner who wishes to cash in and retire can sell his revenue generating les tothe highest bidder. The obvious risk is that a wealthy opponent might buy upenough servers to have a signi cant chance of obtaining all the copies of a targetle. The substitute risk is that a single network service provider might acquireenough market share to flick the anonymity of communications and trackdown the copies. How can these risks be controlled? One might try to accept server owners,but any central body responsible for certifying `this site is not an NSA sitecould be bought or coerced, while if the certi cation were distributed amongmany individuals, few of them would have the resources to investigate would-beserver owners thoroughly. An alternative could be to decease the security insurance policy tothe user who uploads the le: she could say something like, `I want seven copiesof my le to be move randomly around the adjacent(a) fty sites. The problemhere is how we prevent policy erosion as sites are replaced over time. At a more mundane level, we need mechanisms to run off a le server ownercheating by claiming annuity pa! yments on a le without property a copy all thetime. After all, he could just download the le from the Eternity Service itselfwhenever he ask to demonstrate possession. This provides yet another reasonwhy les must be encrypted with keys the server owners do not know; then theannuity payment server can pose a challenge such as `calculate a macintosh on yourle using the following key to check that the annuitant authentically has kept all thedata that he is being paid to keep. 4.9 TimeOne of the complications is that we need to be able to trust the time; other-wise the opponent might skirt the network time protocol to say that thedate is now 2500AD and loan about general le deletion. Does this bring thevane Time communications protocol (and thus the worldwide Positioning System and thus theUS subdivision of Defense) within the security perimeter, or do we create ourown secure time service? The mechanics of such a service have been discussedin other contexts, but there is as yet no really secure clock on the Internet. A dependable time service could bene t other applications, such as currencyexchange legal proceeding that are conducted in a merchants exposit while thebank is o ine. Meanwhile, we must plan to rely on wide dispersal, increase someextra rules such as `assets may not be deleted unless the sysadmin con rms thedate, `the date for deletion purposes may never exceed the construct date ofthe system software by ve years, and `no le may be deleted until all annuitypayments for it have been received. 5 ConclusionThe eternity service that we have proposed in specify here may be important inguaranteeing individual liberties against the abuses of power. It is also interestingfrom the scienti c point of view, and the purpose of this paper has been to presentit to the cryptology and computer security communities as an interesting problemthat merits further study. Building the eternity service will force us to clarify a number of points such asthe nature of secure time, the limits to resilience of d! istributed authenticationservices, and the write-once list of large databases. The rove shouldalso broaden our understanding of anonymity. It appears, for example, that thedi culty of scaling anonymous communications is an indwelling feature ratherthan a nuisance; if there were just one channel, the judge could have it cut orflooded. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the service is that it might memorise us alot about availability. Just as our appreciation of con dentiality was developedby working out the second- and third-order e ects of the Bell LaPadula policymodel [Amo94], and authenticity came to be understood as a result of analysingthe defects in cryptographic protocols [AN95], so the Eternity Service provides asetting in which availability services must be provided despite the most extremeopponents imaginable. AcknowledgementsSome of these ideas have been sharpen in discussions with Roger Needham,David Wheeler, prostrate Blaze, Mike Reiter, Bruce Schneier, Birgit P tzmann,Peter Ryan and Rajashekhar Kailar; and I am grateful to the Isaac NewtonInstitute for hospitality while this paper was being written. 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ACM Conf. on Computer and CommunicationsSecurity 1994 pp 68{80[Rot95] J Rothenberg, \Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents, in Scienti cAmerican (January 1995) pp 24{29[VN94] BR Venkataraman, RE Newman-Wolfe, \Performance Analysis of a Methodfor High take aim Prevention of Tra c Analysis Using Measurements from aCampus Network, in Computer Security Applications 94 pp 2 88{297[Won94] K Wong, \ lineage doggedness Planning, in Computer Fraud and SecurityBulletin (April 94) pp 10 - 16 If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com

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