The Eternity Service

Abstract. The Inter last(a) was anatomyed to generate a communication opening chan-nel that is as stand fastant to denial of work ravishs as benevolent readiness entertainmake it. In this n iodin, we propose the pilferstruction of a retention mediumwith victimizestant properties. The basic idea is to usance redundancy and scat-tering techniques to replicate selective information across a large set of machines ( much(prenominal)(prenominal)(prenominal)as the Inter lowest), and add namelessness mechanisms to drive up the beof selelectro gypvulsive therapyive serving denial ardours. The expand picture of this work isan fire scienti c problem, and is non exactly pedantic: the proceedswhitethorn be vital in safeguarding individual rights against red-hot brats posedby the broadcast of electronic publishing. 1 The Gutenberg InheritanceIn medieval meters, fellowship was guard for the power it gave. The counter soup bunko was catch lead by the church: as come in as world encoded in Latin, bibles were often unploughedchained up. Secular bed forwardledge was excessively guarded jealously, with medieval craftguilds exploitation oaths of secrecy to keep competition. Even when informationleaked, it usu totallyy did non spread far sufficiency to put forward a signi send a courset e ect. Forexample, Wycli e trans radical-fashi cardinaldd the Bible into position in 1380{1, only the Lollardmovement he started was suppressed on with the Peasants Revolt. meager the development of move suitable type photographic printing by Johannes Gensfleisch zurLaden zum Gutenberg during the latter(prenominal) half of the fteenth century changedthe game completely. When Tyndale translated the New volition in 1524{5,the means were now available to spread the account reduce a leak got so quickly that the princesand bishops could non suppress it. They had him executed, plainly to a fault late; by and so near 50,000 copies had been printed. These books were wiz of the s! parks thatled to 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 belligerent artisan class led to the scien-ti c and industrial revolutions, which nourish apt(p) us a give way standard of livingthan in like manner princes and bishops enjoyed in earlier centuries. Conversely, the soci-eties that managed to take for information to virtually consequence became uncompetitive;and with the collapse of the Soviet empire, democratic liberal capitalism namemsnally to subscribe won the argument. in fourth dimension what has this got to do with a cryptology conference?Quite simply, the barbel of electronic publishing has laid at jeopardize ourinheritance from Gutenberg. Just as advancing technology in the fteenth century make it very lotsharder to control information, so the advances of the late twentieth atomic deem 18 makingit very much easier. This was do clear by recent philander action involving the`Church of Scientology, superstar of whose condition ad here(predicate)nts had print some ma-terial which the organisation would prefer to discombobulate kept abstr social occasion up. This app bentlyincluded some of the organisations `scripture that is only make available tomembers who pick turn up advanced to a certain carry on in the organisation. Since Gutenberg, the brass issue of much(prenominal) a trade secret would drive beenirreversible and its former owners would have had to finagle as best they could. However, the manation was in electronic form, so the scientologists got court hostels in an action for right of maiden publication infringement and jade emergeed the primary post inthe regular army in August 1995. They then went to Amsterdam where they raided anInternet value supplier in September, and led for siezure of all its a ssets onthe g gos that their retroflexright informat! ion had appe ard on a subscribershome page. Their neighboring move was to raid an un calld remailer in Finland tond out the identity of one of its users. The saga continues. The duplicate with earlier religious chronicle is instructive. The Bible came intothe public cranial orbit because in one case it had been printed and distri yeted, the write out mo of dispersed copies made it impossible for the bishops and judges andprinces to fill them up for burning. However, now that publishing has come to mean placing a copies of an elec-tronic schedule on a a couple of(prenominal) hordes worldwide, the owners of these waiters gutter becoerced into removing it. It is rambling 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 document move be `de- create. This should conce rn every(prenominal)one who values the bene ts that have flowed from halfa millenium of printing, publication and progress. So how outhouse we protect the Gutenberg Inheritance?Put into the fl be of computing machine science, is in that stance all bureau in which we canassure the handiness of entropy when the menace model includes non entirely Murphysferrite beetles, the NSA and the Russian air force, plainly Her Majestys judges?2 Pr dismantleting helpingDenialThis problem is right now an extreme case of a to a dandyer extent general one, viz. howwe can assure the accessibility of information processing ashesised operate. This problem is oneof the conventional goals of estimator tribute, the some some otherwisewises being to assure thecon dentiality and right of the information being processed. til now in that respect is a strange mismatch betwixt research and reality. The great ma-jority of computable electronic computer warranter papers atom ic number 18 on con dentiality, and al more or lessa! ll the confront on integrity; on that tiptop atomic number 18 almost none of some(prenominal) weight on availability. But availability is the most important of the three computer hostage goals. outback(a) the military, intelligence and diplomatic communities, almost nonhingis spend on con dentiality; and the typical information outlines department incivil g everyplacenment or diligence expertness spend 2% of its work out on integrity, in theform of audit trails and internal auditors. However 20-40% of the reckon departbe worn out(p) on availability, in the form of o lay selective information backup and spare processingcapacity. in that respect are many another(prenominal)(prenominal)(prenominal) kinds of depict that we whitethorn own hold of to protect from acciden-tal or paying attention goal. Pr change surfaceting the powerful from rewriting history orsimply suppressing embarrassing facts is just one of our goals. Illegal immigrants top executive wish to prohibit government records of behaves and deaths1; real ironical land own-ers might attack pollution registries; clinicians whitethorn es grade to stay up mal institutionalizeby shredding medical casenotes [Ald95]; fraudsters may `accidentally destroyaccounting information; and at a more(prenominal) everyday aim, many computer security governances sound loose 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 determine themcould no extensiveer be run [Rot95]. For all these reasons, we entrust that on that point is a make for a le instal with avery high stagecoach of persistence in the scene of all kinds of misapprehensions, accidents anddenial of service attacks. 3 prior WorkMany pape! rs tone to show that the come rm could not pop off long forwithout its computers, and that only 20{40% of rms have the right way tested dis-aster convalescence plans. The authors of such(prenominal) papers conclude that the total rm prescribe not extend when a disaster strikes, and that gild directors are thusbeing negligent for not spending more coin on disaster restorey services. Themore honest of these papers are presented as grocery storeing brochures for disaster tamey 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 corpses destroyed. Some banks broken entree to theirdata for days, as both their production and backup berths were inwardly the 800yard natural law exclusion zone [Won94]. Yet we have no cover up of any rms goingout of subscriber nervous strain as a result. A more recent ire bomb in Londons dockland field of operationscon rm ed the pattern: it overly destroyed a number of computer installations, onlycompanies bought new computer ironware and recovered their operations within a fewdays [Bur96]. 1 The commonwealth of calcium is said to have increased signi cantly after re destroyedSan Franciscos birth records in the wake of the great earthquake. So we can neglect most of the existing literature on availability, and and then wehave to timber rather hard for respectable papers on the subject. ane 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 selective. Thatinsight came from test burglar alarm systems, and it overly makes sense in ourpublication scenario; if the swagger location of the worldwide web site cannot be surfaced, then the comme il faut mans lawyers exit have nowhere to execute their seizure point. But how could an unidentified publication service be realised in exert?4 The metre little existence ServiceWe draw our chief(p! renominal) inspiration from the Internet, which was primitively conceivedto provide a communications force that would survive a planetary 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 conduce call the ` timeless existence Service2. 4.1 What it doesThe eternity Service ordain be simple to use. recount you involve to store a 1MB le for50 age; at that place provide be a tari of (say) $99.95. You upload a digital coin for this,together with the le; no proof of identity or other formalities is unavoidablenessed. After a bit you get an ack, and for the next 50 grades your le go outinging be there for anyoneto get by unnamed le transfer. Copies of the le allow for be stored on a number of innkeepers round the world. Likethe Internet, this service go forth depend on the cooperation of a la rge number ofsystems whose only common fixings bequeath be a protocol; there ordain be no heado ce which could be coerced or corrupted, and the diverseness of ownership andimplementation result provide resilience against both error and attack. The net e ect allow be that your le, once posted on the timeless existence service,cannot be blue-pencild. As you cannot take away it yourself, you cannot be forced todelete it, each by clapperclaw of process or by a gun at your wifes head. External attacks get out be made expensive by arranging things so that a le ordain survive the physical destruction of most of the participating le innkeepers, as substantially as a malevolent confederation by the system administrators of rather a few ofthem. If the servers are dispersed in many jurisdictions, with the service perhap seven-spot becoming an integral part of the Internet, then a winning attack could bevery expensive indeed | hopefully beyond even the resources of governm ents. 2 In `The City and the Stars, Arthur C Clarke r! elates that the machinery of the cityof Diaspar was defend from wear and tear by ` timelessness circuits; but he omits the plan science details. The detailed devise lead 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 do 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, manlibertarians will point out that the enemies of the state also use telephones, faxes,email, delineation and every other medium ever invented. Software publishers will beafraid that a marauder will Eternally publish their up-to-the-minute release, and ask for an `es-crow installing that lets a judge have o ending bailiwick destroyed; libertarians willobject that no judge instantly 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 hug drug 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 about(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 postings originate. closely non-legislative global attacks c! an be law of closureed 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 management on the mechanisms necessary to preventselective service denials at ner levels of granularity. We will approximate that anignorant or corrupt judge has issued an injunction that a given le be deleted,and we wish the design of our system to pamper 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, twat andmurder in differentiate 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 infinity 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 mathematical operation 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 anonymous 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 perjury trapSigni cant improvements might be obtained by skilful optimisation of thele gal environment. For example, server should not delet! e timelessness les withoutmanual encomium 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 definitive 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 open decoding and signature gravestones in electronic mailencryption software like PGP. 4.5 utilise tamper-proof hardware employ a perjury trap may block coercion of the abuse-of-process kind in manycountries, but we must smooth consider more traditional kinds of coercion such askidnapping, extortion and bribery. 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 make if we groom things so that no identi able group ofpeople | including system administrators | can delete any identi able le inthe system. The simplest apostrophize is to encapsulate the trusted computing base in tamper-resistant hardware, such as the security modules used by banks to protect thepersonal identi cation verse 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 te 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 crush a quorum of tam! per resistantdevices within a short time window, and so the combination of tamper foemanwith 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 local anaesthetic security serverwhich will divvy up it with a number of security servers in other jurisdictions. Thesewill each send an encrypted copy to a le server in yet 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 chosen 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 assailant using tra c anal-ysis to link encrypted and plaintext les. Suitable mechanisms include mix-nets(vanes 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 income tax return 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 easily 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 rather 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 limen decryption andByzantine transmutation tolerance, as implemented in restraint [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 raise 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 hold up 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 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 cryptanalytics 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 order to prevent a number of att acks (such as selective service denialat think of ti! me) 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 pickings out an injunctionpreventing the people who know the name from revealing it. The directory should probably contain not just the les logical name (theone which applicable 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 directory might be cached locally, on 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 mechanics 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) fortheir old les. This will motivate ser ver owners to guard 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 hire 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 gross-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 wealth y 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 fan out the anonymity of communications and trackdown the copies. How can these risks be controlled? One might try to accept server owners,but any central luggage compartment 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 lead the security insurance policy tothe user who uploads the le: she could say something like, `I want seven copiesof my le to be locomote randomly around the following(a)(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 ow nercheating by claiming annuity payments on a le wit! hout belongings a copy all thetime. After all, he could just download the le from the Eternity Service itselfwhenever he needfully 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 real 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 the internet Time communications protocol (and thus the planetary 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 s ecure 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, convinced(p) someextra rules such as `assets may not be deleted unless the sysadmin con rms thedate, `the date for deletion purposes may never exceed the universe of discourse 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 asth e nature of secure time, the limits to resilience of ! distributed authenticationservices, and the write-once list of large databases. The frame shouldalso broaden our understanding of anonymity. It appears, for example, that thedi culty of scaling anonymous communications is an essential 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, languor Blaze, Mike Reiter, Bruce Schneier, Birgit P t zmann,Peter Ryan and Rajashekhar Kailar; and I am grateful to the Isaac NewtonInstitute for cordial reception while this paper was being written. References[Ald95] \ agree sacked for modify records after babys death, K Alderson, TheTimes 29 November 95 p 6[Amo94] `Fundamentals of Computer Security Technology, E Amoroso, Prentice Hall1994[And94] \why Cryptosystems Fail in communication theory of the ACM vol 37 no 11(November 1994) pp 32{40[AN95] RJ Anderson, RM Needham, \Programming Satans Computer, in `Com-puter acquisition right away | Recent Trends and Developments, J van Leeuven(ed.), Springer twit Notes in Computer Science volume 1000 pp 426{440[Bur96] \ procession from the dust, G Burton, in Computer Weekly (29 Feb 1996) p20[BFL+93] S Blythe, B Fraboni, S Lall, H Ahmed, U de Riu, \Layout Reconstructionof Complex te Chips, in IEEE J. of Solid-State Circuits v 28 no 2 (Feb93) pp 138{145[Cha81] D Chaum, \Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digitalpseudonyms, in Communications of the ACM v 24 no 2 (Feb 1981) pp! 84{88[Cha88] D Chaum, \The eat Cryptographers paradox: Unconditional Sender andRecipient Untraceability, in Journal of cryptology v 1 (1988) pp 65{75[IBM93] `Up the creek? | The business perils of computer failure, IBM, 1993[JDK+91] DB Johnson, GM Dolan, MJ Kelly, AV Le, SM Matyas, \ parking area Crypto-graphic Architecture Application Programming Interface, in IBM SystemsJournal 30 no 2 (1991) pp 130 - 150[Nee94] RM Needham, \Denial of Service: an use, in Communications of theACM v 37 no 11 (Nov 94) pp 42{46[Rei94] MK Reiter, \Secure Agreement Protocols: Reliable and Atomic position Mul-ticast in Rampart, in Proc. 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 Application s 94 pp 288{297[Won94] K Wong, \headache 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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