The Free Haven Project: Distributed Anonymous Storage Service

作者：Roger Dingledine, Michael J. Freedman, David Molnar

全文：http://www.freehaven.net/doc/berk/freehaven-berk.ps

1 Introduction
Anonymous publication and storage services allow individuals to speak freely without fear of persecution, yet such systems remain poorly understood. Political dissidents must publish in order to reach enough people for their criticisms of a regime to be eective, yet they and their readers require anonymity. Less extreme examples involve cases in which a large and powerful private organization attempts to silence its critics by attacking either the critics themselves or those who make the criticism publically available. Additionally, the recent controversy over Napster and Gnutella has highlighted both a widespread demand for anonymous publication services for non-political purposes, and the consequences of such services failing to provide the anonymity expected.

Systems meeting these needs are just starting to be deployed, and the exact requirements and design choices are not yet clear. Events in 1999 and 2000 have highlighted some shortcomings of already deployed systems; the identication and removal of Napster users who downloaded Metallica songs[30] and the Gnutella Wall of Shame[12] are two examples. These shortcomings led to the development of a new generation of anonymous publication services, such as Freenet[11], which focus specically on providing anonymity.

It is in this spirit that the Free Haven Project aims to design, implement, and deploy a functioning distributed anonymous storage service. We distinguish storage from publication in that storage services focus less on accessibility and more on persistence of data. In the process, we hope to clarify some of the requirements for such systems and highlight design choices......