From: "John M" <estoy@hotmail.com>
Date: Fri, 23 Jan 1998 13:30:14 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: How to eliminate liability?
Message-ID: <19980123052334.20406.qmail@hotmail.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



This is just an idea I thought I would throw out and see what happens.  
There has been considerable discussion recently about datahavens, how no 
one physical location in meatspace is safe, and how there is no single 
place on earth that a datahaven could exist that would accept all kinds 
of information.

Well, what about spreading the information out?  Something simple like 
doing a matrix rotation on the scrambled data in 8 byte blocks and 
splice it by bit to split the data up, add ECC (error correction code) 
to it, and spread it to several servers.  This way no one server has all 
the information necessary to recreate the "offending" information and if 
one server gets "hit" (killed), the information can still be regenerated 
from the the information and ECC from the other servers.

The bit splitting I'm talking about would go something like this.  The 
data would be set up in clusters of eight bytes and then these eight 
bytes would be rotated, error correction applied, divided byte by byte 
to separate queues (for separate destinations), resequenced to include 
the ECC overhead, and sent on it's merry way.

Original encrypted information:

Cluster A               Cluster B...
Byte 1: 01001011
Byte 2: 10101110
Byte 3: 10010110
Byte 4: 10110111
Byte 5: 01011100
Byte 6: 10111011
Byte 7: 10001101
Byte 8: 00110110

After the matrix rotate:

Cluster A               Cluster B...
Byte 1: 01110110
Byte 2: 10001000
Byte 3: 01010101
Byte 4: 00111101
Byte 5: 11001110
Byte 6: 01111011
Byte 7: 11110101
Byte 8: 10010110


Add ECC:

Cluster A               Cluster B...
Byte 1:   01110110 1
Byte 2:   10001000 0
Byte 3:   01010101 0
Byte 4:   00111101 1
Byte 5:   11001110 1
Byte 6:   01111011 0
Byte 7:   11110101 0
Byte 8:   10010110 0

ECC byte: 01000000 0


Divided up:

Cluster A         ECC-A  Cluster B ECC-B
Byte 1: 01110110  1      10100011  0

Resequenced into separate queues by byte in cluster:

01110110 11010001 10......

...and distributed to the servers.


These are just my ramblings, I'm not a programmer (or at least I haven't 
been for a long time).  Nor do I claim to know if this form of 
distribution will escape the legal issues of storing certain data on on 
servers in specific areas of meatspace (I'm no lawyer (kill the 
lawyers)).  At the very least, it seems that this scheme (or something 
like it, if this form of ECC is not sufficient) could be used to keep 
data from being lost if one or more servers gets whacked by armed forces 
or a nuclear bomb.  I'm not even going to think about how this data 
could be distributed.  You guys can do that...

Feedback and flames welcome.

John

estoy@hotmail.com



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