Privacy

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Revision as of 18:20, 30 October 2006 by Bender (talk | contribs) (Caretaker: Format cat links)


Privacy & Security

Both terms come to this same page, but they have a slightly different meaning. Privacy is the resource that is made available by Security. Security is a global organisation in the network composed of methods and computational, storage and bandwidth resource which is used to make the resource of privacy available according to local dynamic need.

Why do we need security?

Having good security is an important aspect of the network architecture because it is designed to handle financial accounting and budgeting of its member organisations. Also, the users of the network need to be confident that private information such as passwords or personal details really are private.

Real security a myth?

There isn't much confidence in real privacy these days with all the rumors and/or facts of "back doors" and quantum computers which can achieve seemingly miraculous computational power. But before getting sucked in to all the hype, bare this simple foundation in mind - if two people share a private random block of information used one time only to encrypt a message of the same size, it is mathematically impossible to break, even by quantum computation - it is said to exhibit information theoretic security. Its only organisation which makes this method impractical - in practice the network would usually combine this method with traditional methods.

Method

The privacy concept uses a portion of its global bandwidth resource to distribute private keys over all available data streams. This resource comes from the support that the privacy concept gains from usage.

This privacy is handled with any of the standard algorithms such as DES or AES, but using the inherent organisational methods to generate and maintain a diverse population of private keys so that any context of information can be made arbitrarily secure dynamically and independently. A small portion of bandwidth is dedicated to random connectivity for creating keys with more diverse properties, and for finding new efficient routes.

When a context requires its connected streams to be authenticated, it generates random content along with a randomly selected key it shares in common with the peer. The context expects a hash of the random content and private value associated with the key. This can happen any number of times and can also occur independently of the context directly between peers.

Organisational aspects requiring privacy

  • Logins and passwords need to be securely routed amongst peers
  • Financial transactions and account balances must be trusted
  • Users personal information must be kept private

Available key properties/constraints

  • Media its resided on (RAM, HDD, Removable etc)
  • Peers its resided on
  • Protocols its travelled through