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How do you determine if the transparent and inspectable filtering program is operating correctly if you only have access to the output and none of the inputs?
by thwarted 16y ago
How do you determine if the transparent and inspectable filtering program is operating correctly if you only have access to the output and none of the inputs? You'd need all of the inputs, and at that point, you just have access to all the information anyway, and wouldn't need the program to do the filtering.
- derefr 16y agoReliable computing isn't just for NASA; it also works when an individual codebase may have been designed to "malfunction." Instead of a single machine, you contract several independent, mutually untrustworthy parties to implement (open, inspectable) machines, with an architecture that takes votes from all machines into account. You could then spit out a log of (hash of input, vote) pairs from each machine to see that the voting architecture is also operating correctly.
- thwarted 16y agoYou'd need at least one trustworthy party because you can not trust the mutually untrustworthy parties to not give similarly faked logs. If the goal is secrecy, increasing the number of parties that have access to the inputs undermines that, especially if they are untrustworthy, even if they have "contracts". While the solution you've outlined may be mathematically sound, I don't think it is very pragmatic.