On Fri, 05 May 2000, Greg Retkowski wrote:
> On Thu, 4 May 2000, Oskar Sandberg wrote:
<> 
> Granted, this approach puts a degree of trust in the node(s) recieving the
> update. It brings up another issue though. When the author inserts the
> initial revision, does he not have to trust the server nodes to not alter
> his data? If I (or a server) request a key for the first time, do I have
> any way to know if the server sending the key is really sending what it
> recieved? Or could that node alter the data without anyone being the
> wiser? There could also be the rare instance of two people inserting the
> same key at the same time on different servers. If I was the
> author I could sign the document with a cryptographic key which the reader
> would have to obtain and validate out of band (i.e. get my public key via
> email) or make the SHA1 hash some way publically known.. I would do this
> for revisions also.

The various signature and hash based schemes discussed (which you would be
aware of if you had even made the slightest effort) do protect against nodes
altering data on insert.

Even without those there is a huge difference however. When data is first
inserted, it's key is new and the nodes won't recognize the hash. If you have a
notorious or famous piece of updatable data, then nodes could sniff for updates
to it use those to delete the data.

Out of band after the fact validation of the data is not very helpful as you
are putting your faith in user effort, and because being able to tell that the
data has been corrupted is not very helpful, given that it has been corrupted.
Availability, not trust, is the most important pillar of Freenet.

<> 
> I appreciate your understanding and helpful comments; perhaps I should
> have stated in my earlier message that I have just joined the mailing list
> and therefore at a loss as to what has already been discussed. Oh wait, I
> did say that.

Putting "this is spam" at the top of a spam message does not make it less
annoying. How about instead of expecting us to waste our time filling you in on
what has been discussed here before, you found out yourself, before you so
audaciously start telling us what we "should" do.  

> I think in the end some form of revision based update system is probably
> the most flexable. It still leaves the sticky problem of how new revisions
> get 'discovered' by nodes though..

It is not a very sticky problem, there is a simple solution that I have
described before.

> 
> -- Greg
> 
> Greg Retkowski                          Mail: greg at rage.net
> Raging Network Services                 URL:  http://www.rage.net/
> 
> 
> 
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-- 

Oskar Sandberg

md98-osa at nada.kth.se

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lK[d2%Sa2/d0$^Ixp"|dc`;s/\W//g;$_=pack('H*',/((..)*)$/)

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