On Tuesday 28 October 2003 05:24 pm, Toad wrote:
> What makes you think this wouldn't be grossly exploitable? Publicly
> writable TUKs seem a bad idea to me... the question is whether they are
> worse than the alternative.

Well, not strictly publicly writable. (They have to be signed with the private 
key) allthough, with applications like frost the private key is easily 
acquirable as the board is public, after all. However if someone wanted to be 
malicious they can just as easily modify the board.

What is really needed for something like frost is three key levels. 1. 
read/verify all keys. 2. limited write abilities 3. private key. The Private 
key would function as it does now. The first would read the TUK and be used 
to check the signatures of the other two. The Second would be another private 
key that would be able to increment TUK such that it can only increase it by 
one and the TUK is still verifiable. Ideally it would support an arbitrary 
number of keys of the second type.

Here is how I would see this working:
|[EMAIL PROTECTED]/TUK/_________|
| int Edition; int minTimeBeforeUpdate;|
| key publicKey #2;                    |
| key publicKey #3;                    |
|       ...                            |
| key publicKey #n;                    |
|____signed - Privatekey #1.           |
|____Addition by key #3                |
| int Edition+1;  int TIME-Day;        |
|____signed - Privatekey #3.           |
|____Addition by key #2                |
| int Edition+1;  int TIME-Day;        |
|____signed - Privatekey #2.           |
|_____________EOF______________________|

This way the master key can at any time add or revoke the other keys, and the 
other keys can increment the key. The node that receives an insert for a TUK 
it already has, checks the signature of the new edition and checks to make 
sure that they are only trying to increase the current version by one. If the 
master key sends an update it replaces the whole message, but it can still 
only increase the version by one (or none) or the node will return an error.

Then a message board could have a manager, that could revoke people's ability 
to post there if they spam the board or what have you. At the same time it 
allows many people to send messages to it rapidly, as once they insert their 
message into the TUK the they have a spot claimed for their message. Even if 
two copies of the same TUK are updated at the same time on diffrent parts of 
the network, they can be combined into one.

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