[freehaven-cvs] Added an intro

[nickm@seul.org (Nick Mathewson)]

Update of /home/freehaven/cvsroot/doc/econp2p03
In directory moria.mit.edu:/tmp/cvs-serv2775

Modified Files:
	econp2p03.tex 
Log Message:
Added an intro

Index: econp2p03.tex
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RCS file: /home/freehaven/cvsroot/doc/econp2p03/econp2p03.tex,v
retrieving revision 1.3
retrieving revision 1.4
diff -u -d -r1.3 -r1.4
--- econp2p03.tex	1 Apr 2003 11:04:19 -0000	1.3
+++ econp2p03.tex	1 Apr 2003 23:51:37 -0000	1.4
@@ -47,8 +47,40 @@
 %\textbf{Keywords:} foo, bar, baz
 %\end{center}
 
-\section{Intro}
+\section{Introdoction}
+
+In decentralized networks, many traditional means of ensuring
+accountability between participants become unworkable.  As the
+combined resources of indivitual participants outgrow those of a
+(possibly nonexistant) central authority, top-down enforcement of good
+behavior becomes unwieldy.  As the number of participants becomes
+large, repeated interactions between participants can become
+infrequent, and so individuals cannot rely on their own past
+experience to recognize those who behave badly.  Under these
+circumstances, reputation is one of few workable means to keep hostile
+and freeloading nodes from damaging the system.
+
+But when the network's very purpose is to provide anonymity,
+reputation itself becomes problematic.  On the one hand, anonymity
+enables an attacker or freeloader to acquire a bad reputation for as
+many psuedonymous identities as he likes, throwing each one away at no
+real cost.  But on the other hand, any reputation information that the
+system {\it does} manage do gather could be used by an adversary to
+attempt to analyze and subvert the anonymity provided.  
 
+So we are left with a conundrum: if the networks's stability relies
+on the good performance of individual nodes, reputation may be the
+only way to achieve it.  But reputation data is hard to gather in
+the presence of anonymity, and even when gathered, poses a potential
+vulnerability for an attacker to exploit.
+
+As with security, it is tempting but incorrect to think that
+reputation is a simple matter of bolting an extra service to the side
+of an existing system.  In the rest of this paper, we illustrate this
+point with examples from deputation systems that have been designed
+for use in networks that provide pseudonymity and anonymity.  First,
+however, we outline the incentive structures involved in deploying
+such networks.
 
 \section{An Economics of Anonymity}
 

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