[freehaven-dev] an abstract

[Roger R Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

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The Internet is growing at an unprecedented rate. However, while technical
advances are providing greatly increased bandwidth and well-connected
storage capacity, support for privacy and anonymity on the Internet is
largely unchanged. Commercial enterprises as well as free software projects
are hoping to help solve this problem: examples include Zero Knowledge
Systems, a company building its own closed-source private network
of low-latency mixnets, and the Freenet project, a group of Internet
programmers designing a network that will duplicate frequently retrieved
information and thus make it difficult to delete information. Most
current works suffer either from closed or unfinished source. More
importantly, though, their designs sacrifice anonymity for accessibility.
The Free Haven Project aims to design and deploy a system which uses a
secure mixnet for communication, and which emphasizes distributed, reliable,
and anonymous storage over efficient retrieval. Some of the problems we
address include providing sufficient accountability without sacrificing
anonymity, building trust between servers based entirely on their observed
behavior, and providing user interfaces that will make the system usable for
end-users.
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