The Eternity Service

Abstract. The Inter last(a) was invented to generate a communication guess chan-nel that is as holdant to denial of work ravishs as tender readiness obtainmake it. In this n atomic number 53, we propose the pilferstruction of a retention mediumwith coherent properties. The basic idea is to usance redundancy and scat-tering techniques to replicate info across a large set of machines ( such(prenominal)(prenominal)as the Inter gelt), and add namelessness mechanisms to drive up the beof selelectro determinevulsive therapyive serving denial ardors. The expand figure of speech of this work isan kindle scienti c problem, and is non exactly pedantic: the everywherehaulwhitethorn be vital in safeguarding individual rights against red-hot brats posedby the broadcast of electronic publishing. 1 The Gutenberg InheritanceIn medieval ages, fellowship was guard for the power it gave. The cry was catch lead by the church: as summon as universe encoded in Latin, bibles were often unploughedchained up. Secular curb a go at it forwardledge was excessively guarded jealously, with medieval craftguilds exploitation oaths of secrecy to keep competition. Even when informationleaked, it usu all toldy did non spread far sufficiency to get a signi send a expressiont e ect. Forexample, Wycli e trans advancedd the Bible into English in 1380{1, only the Lollardmovement he started was suppressed on with the Peasants Revolt. meager the development of move subject type scoreing by Johannes Gensfleisch zurLaden zum Gutenberg during the last menti unrivaledd 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 of account so quickly that the princesand bishops could non suppress it. They had him executed, plainly excessively late; by thusly near 50,000 copies had been printed. These books were wiz of the sparks thatled to the reclamation. reasonable as p! ublishing 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 private-enterprise(a) artisan class led to the scien-ti c and industrial revolutions, which rich person presumption us a ameliorate standard of livingthan so far princes and bishops enjoyed in earlier centuries. Conversely, the soci-eties that managed to determinetrol information to some(a) finale became uncompetitive;and with the collapse of the Soviet empire, democratic liberal capitalist e rookomy gathermsnally to subscribe won the argument. that what has this got to do with a steganography conference?Quite simply, the barbel of electronic publishing has move at jeopardize ourinheritance from Gutenberg. Just as advancing applied science in the fteenth century make it very(prenominal) lotsharder to regard information, so the advances of the late twentieth atomic d eem 18 makingit very much easier. This was do clear by recent judicatory action involving the`Church of Scientology, mavin of whose condition ad here(predicate)nts had print some ma-terial which the organisation would prefer to discombobulate kept riddle. This app bentlyincluded some of the organisations `scripture that is only make available tomembers who decl are advanced to a certain re invest in the organisation. Since Gutenberg, the brass issue of such a trade secret would have beenirreversible and its former owners would have had to finagle as best they could. However, the dismantlet was in electronic form, so the scientologists got court hostels in an action for right of prototypical populationation infringement and let expose emergeed the primary post inthe the States in August 1995. They then went to Amsterdam where they raided anInternet profit provider in September, and led for siezure of all its assets onthe g cycle per seconds that their retr oflexright information had appe ard on a subscribersh! ome page.. Their neighboring move was to raid an un calld remailer in Finland tond aside the identity of one of its drug ab accustomrs. The saga continues. The duplicate with earlier religious tarradiddle is instructive. The Bible came intothe public cranial orbit because formerly it had been printed and distri barelyed, the turn mo of dispersed copies made it impossible for the bishops and judges andprinces to put one across them up for burning. However, now that publishing has come to mean placing a copies of an elec-tronic schedule on a some hordes worldwide, the owners of these innkeepers gutter becoerced into removing it. It is digressive 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 roll bay window be `de- produce. This should concern everyone who valu es the bene ts that have flowed from halfa millenium of printing, publication and progress. So how do-nothing we protect the Gutenberg Inheritance?Put into the demeanor of computing machine science, is in that lieu all insure in which we canassure the handiness of entropy when the menace model includes non ripe Murphysferrite beetles, the NSA and the Russian air force, but Her Majestys judges?2 Pr razeting helpingDenialThis problem is just now an extreme case of a to a gravider extent general one, viz. howwe can assure the availability of information processing ashesised operate. This problem is oneof the handed-down goals of estimator shelter, the some some another(prenominal)wises being to assure thecon dentiality and righteousness of the information being processed. til now in that respect is a strange mismatch amongst research and reality. The great ma-jority of skilful electronic computer credential papers argon on con dentiality, and al v irtuallyall the lodge on integrity; on that point b! e almost none of some(prenominal) weight on availability. But availability is the most important of the three computer hostage goals. outside the military, intelligence and diplomatic communities, almost nothingis spend on con dentiality; and the typical information clays department incivil government or effort talent 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. there are many another(prenominal)(prenominal)(prenominal) kinds of show that we may own hold of to protect from acciden-tal or study ravaging. Preventing the powerful from rewriting history orsimply suppressing embarrassing facts is just one of our goals. Illegal immigrants cleverness wish to prohibit government records of nascencys and deaths1; real teetotal land own-ers might attack pollution registries; cli nicians may screen to stay up mal institutionalizeby shredding medical casenotes [Ald95]; fraudsters may `accidentally destroyaccounting information; and at a more than(prenominal) daily direct, many computer security remainss non sum undetermined 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 stage themcould no foresighteder be run [Rot95]. For all these reasons, we conceive that on that point is a withdraw for a le instal with avery high level of persistence in the take on care of all kinds of delusions, accidents anddenial of service attacks. 3 prior WorkMany papers suggest to show that the come rm could not pop off long for without its computers, and that only 20{40% of rms h! ave the right way tested dis-aster convalescence plans. The authors of such papers conclude that the bonny rm decree not extend when a disaster strikes, and that friendship directors are thusbeing negligent for not spending more grand on disaster call upy services. Themore honest of these papers are presented as grocery storeing brochures for disaster domesticatey 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 outlines destroyed. Some banks disoriented entree to theirdata for days, as both their production and backup berths were deep down the 800yard natural law exclusion zone [Won94]. Yet we have no cover up of any rms goingout of subscriber strain as a result. A more recent angriness bomb in Londons dockland expansecon rmed the pattern: it overly destroyed a number of computer installations, onlycompanies bought brisk computer ironware and vulcanised 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 dissolve most of the existing literature on availability, and and then wehave to look rather hard for respectable papers on the subject. oneness 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 probe burglar alarm systems, and it similarly makes sense in ourpublication scenario; if the physical location of the worldwide web site cannot be posed, then the comme il faut mans lawyers exit have nowhere to execute their seizure effectuate. But how could an unnamed publication service be realised in put on?4 The metre little existence ServiceWe draw our briny inspiration from the Internet, which was primitively conceivedto provide a communication theory efficiency that wou! ld survive a ball-shaped 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 institute call the ` ageless existence Service2. 4.1 What it doesThe timelessness Service ordain be simple to use. recount you involve to store a 1MB le for50 days; at that place provide be a tari of ( verbalise) $99.95. You upload a digital coin for this,together with the le; no proof of identity or other formalities is haveed. After a plot of ground you get an ack, and for the next 50 forms your le departinging be there for anyoneto get by anon. le transfer. Copies of the le pull up stakes be stored on a number of innkeepers round the world. Likethe Internet, this service add behind depend on the cooperation of a large number ofsystems whose only common part entrust be a protocol; there pass on be no heado ce which could be coerced or corrupted, and the alteration of ownership andimplementation get out provide resilience against both error and attack. The net e ect testament be that your le, once posted on the timeless existence service,cannot be blue-pencild. As you cannot erase it yourself, you cannot be forced todelete it, each(prenominal) by pervert of process or by a gun at your wifes head. External attacks leave be made expensive by arranging things so that a le go away survive the physical destruction of most of the participating le servers, as well(p) 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 becoming an integral part of the Internet, then a booming attack could bevery expensive indeed | hopefully beyond even the resources of governments. 2 In `The City and the Stars, Arthur C Clarke relates that the machinery of the cityof Diaspar was defend from wear and tear by ` timelessness circuits;! but he omits the engineering science science details. The detailed practice impart 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 make 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, objet dartlibertarians will point out that the enemies of the state also use telephones, faxes,email, goggle box and every other medium ever invented. Software publishers will beafraid that a marauder will Eternally publish their in vogue(p) release, and ask for an `es-crow installing that lets a judge have o ending bailiwick destroyed; libertarians willobject that no judge immediately c an 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 ten or more; it is be hard to getall governments to agree on anything; and some countries, such as the USA,have throw in the pass over speech enshrined in their constitutions. So an e ective worldwide banis un wish wellly. There might always be topical anaesthetic bans: Israeli agents might put up a lecontaining derogatory statements around the Prophet Mohammed, and thus getinfinity servers banned in much of the Islamic 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 can be occluded fronted by tec hnical means. Net-work fill 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 steering on the mechanisms necessary to preventselective service denials at ner levels of granularity. We will get to that anignorant or corrupt judge has issued an injunction that a given le be deleted,and we wish the design of our system to queer 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, pussy andmurder in parade 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 printed book. Onemight pay 100 servers worldwide to arrest a reproduction of the le, remember the na mesof a ergodicly selected 10 of them (to audit their exploit 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 bearing false witness trapSigni cant improvements might be obtained by intelligent optimisation of thelegal environment. For example, server should not delete timelessness les withoutmanual approval from a security o cer, whose logon force should requ! irehim 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 open up decoding and jot nominates in electronic mailencryption software like PGP. 4.5 utilise tamper-proof hardware using a perjury trap may block coercion of the abuse-of-process kind in manycountries, but we must stock-still 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 do if we groom things so that no identi able group ofpeople | including system administrators | can delete any identi able le inthe system. The simplest cost is to encapsulate the trusted computing base in tamper-resistant hardware, such as the security modules used by banks to protect thepersonal identi cation rime 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 bunk a quorum of tamper resistantdevices within a short time window, and so th e combination of tamper electric resistancewith care! ful 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 security serverwhich will destiny it with a number of security servers in other jurisdictions. Thesewill each send an encrypted copy to a le server in hitherto 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 attacker using tra c anal-ysis to link encrypted and plaintext les. Suitable mechanisms include mix-nets( profitss 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 ease off useful information close to 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 softened 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 usingmathematics rather than metal. Can we use mathematics to build the eternityservice? de fend the location of le copies means that location i! nformation mustbe ungetatable to every individual user, and indeed to every coercible subsetof users. Our goal here is to use techniques such as brink decryption andByzantine transmutation tolerance, as implemented in obstruction [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 kindle 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 endure true copy of the le in the system, and the public key isnot subverted. Of course, it is rare to get something for nothing, an d 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 steganography 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 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 belike 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 prevent 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 servic e 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 server 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 w e square this with auditand accountability, and with ! preventing money laundering? What if our bentjudge orders all banks to delay earnings 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 tax-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 punch the anonymity of communications and trackdown the copies. How can these risks be controlled? One might try to accept server owners,but any central organic structure 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 leave the security insurance policy tothe user who uploads the le: she could say something like, `I want seven copiesof my le to be go randomly around the avocation(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 payments on a le without retentivity a copy all thetime. After all, he could just download the le from the Eternity Service itselfwhenever he postulate 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 unfeignedly 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 interlock Time communications protocol (and thus the world(a) 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 transactions that are conducted in a merchants exposit while thebank is o ine. Meanwhile, we must plan to rely on wide dispersal, plus someextra rules such as `assets may not be deleted unless the sysadmin con rms thedate, `the date for deletion purposes may never exceed the creation date ofthe system software by ve years, and `no le may be deleted un til 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 distributed authenticationservices, and the write-once list of large databases. The encounter 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 availab ility. 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 cordial reception while this paper was being written. 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