4 ms·

How would you guarantee the trustworthiness of a node? How do you guarantee that a node is actually doing what it is supposed to and not inserting malware into

How would you guarantee the trustworthiness of a node? How do you guarantee that a node is actually doing what it is supposed to and not inserting malware into its results? Reputation systems can be gamed (and will be if there's money at stake). I like the notion of trustworthy, general-purpose, publicly distributed computing: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-dawn-of-trustworthy-computing.html http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-dawn-of-trustwo...

sz4kerto 12y ago
I don't know, maybe you cannot guarantee it -- similarly, you cannot guarantee the trustworthyness of Google, or Verisign, etc. They have good reputation in general (let aside the recent NSA stuff), therefore you trust them when you use them. Current systems can be broken as well (starting from DNS poisoning to hacking the actual service, etc.). The idea is not to fix all the problems once -- I'm mostly concerned with a) distributing responsibility, data and therefore power across more parties b) lowering barriers to entry into complex information processing, and as a result, increase innovation. A bit like a cathedral vs. bazaar approach. Again, I don't consider myself a computer wizard who could implement every aspect of this stuff; I am mostly interested in the algo that selects/evolves processing routes based on queries. But then there's the security, payment, service discovery, etc.
dvanduzer 12y ago
> How would you guarantee the trustworthiness of a node? With math. First you need a common consensus of what the publicly searchable corpus is at a given point in time. Computing a hash on the entire set may be impractical, so you partition the crawlspace. Dynamic content makes it tricky to validate distributed crawling, which motivates things like http://named-data.net http://named-data.net A blockchain might be useful as the public ledger for retrospective diffs when asking "What is all the currently public available data right now?"

sz4kerto 12y ago

I don't know, maybe you cannot guarantee it -- similarly, you cannot guarantee the trustworthyness of Google, or Verisign, etc. They have good reputation in general (let aside the recent NSA stuff), therefore you trust them when you use them. Current systems can be broken as well (starting from DNS poisoning to hacking the actual service, etc.). The idea is not to fix all the problems once -- I'm mostly concerned with a) distributing responsibility, data and therefore power across more parties b) lowering barriers to entry into complex information processing, and as a result, increase innovation. A bit like a cathedral vs. bazaar approach. Again, I don't consider myself a computer wizard who could implement every aspect of this stuff; I am mostly interested in the algo that selects/evolves processing routes based on queries. But then there's the security, payment, service discovery, etc.

dvanduzer 12y ago

> How would you guarantee the trustworthiness of a node? With math. First you need a common consensus of what the publicly searchable corpus is at a given point in time. Computing a hash on the entire set may be impractical, so you partition the crawlspace. Dynamic content makes it tricky to validate distributed crawling, which motivates things like http://named-data.net http://named-data.net A blockchain might be useful as the public ledger for retrospective diffs when asking "What is all the currently public available data right now?"