(I'm crossposting this into the p2p-hackers list, since it isn't
freenet-dev stuff.)

On Tue, 27 Feb 2001, Theodore Hong wrote:
> Oskar Sandberg <md98-osa at nada.kth.se> wrote:
> > I didn't think the Oceanstore paper was very interesting. Like you say,
> > the naming scheme is like ours (and that is pretty much the obvious way
> > of doing it). The interesting part is the paper they reference for their
> > global routing system (which I first thought was just a hypercube mesh,
> > but which is actually a lot more complicated):
> >
> > http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/plaxton/ps/1999/tocs.ps
>
> yeah, what you told me at the conference didn't sound that great, but it is
> more sophisticated -- from what I gather, the network is covered by a large
> number of overlapping trees.  Each tree, which corresponds to some object
> GUID, covers all the nodes, but with different orderings.  To find an
> object, you traverse the appropriate tree upwards to its root, and then
> downwards to the location of the object.  Along the way, however, if you
> encounter a downwards reference to the location of the object, go straight
> there.  Thus the root can be corrupt, but it doesn't matter -- the
> important thing is that requests will converge towards the root and
> hopefully intersect a storage reference.  Actually, it doesn't seem that
> dissimilar to Freenet, if you substitute "epicenter" for "root".  I need to
> go actually read the Plaxton paper, though, since they didn't lay out that
> many details.

Upon further thought, the actual protocol is not very different from
what I told you. It is basically a hypercube type search, though they
modify it to allow for arbitrary dimmensions (not hard) and the
ability to decrease the number of hops by increasing the size of the
table at every node (I don't know how to describe that
geometrically).

The further complication, that of going downward in the tree once the
root for an object is found is there, as far as I can tell, to
satisfy their objective of minizing a certain cost function in the
final transfer - something that we do not deal with.

I'm not sure that their model is so fault tolerant to the roots of
objects falling out at all. And to the extent that it is, it has the
problem that it is easy to identify the level of "rootiness" of any
node for a piece of data - making targetted attacks easy. Also, for
Oceanstores big words about mobility of data, this offers little or
no such thing as far as I can tell (which the Oceanstore people get
around by adding the second Bloom filter level, but large parts of
the web are being served by Bloom filter using Squid caches already -
that hardly makes the data mobile).

It is a nice model, but the routing within such a system feel
uncomfortably rigid to me. I do have to look at it in more detail
before passing any final judegement.

> They also had a reference to some type of searching in encrypted data,
> without revealing the search string?  Presumably I guess you present some
> encrypted string, and the algorithm tells you whether the string is present
> in the data without decrypting either?  That could be useful.

I read the paper they reference some time ago, and it is interesting
but 100% useless. Basically it is just encrypting every word as a
seperate block and having the searcher encrypt the search terms with
the same key (but modified heavily so as to not suffer from the
million holes in that version). The only application it might be
useful for are ASP like systems that keep the data secret from the
ASP itself (which would be a cool thing, though not very related to
what we are doing).

In fact, the fact that they presented this as a workable alternative
for searching REALLY did a disservice to the Oceanstore paper in my
eyes (they obviously had not really considered it).

>
> theo
>
>
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