[vos-d] Van Jacobson: "named data"

[Len Bullard]

Understood completely and I know how SSL, checksums, asymmetric keys, etc
work but without the understanding that content drifting away from its
original sources corrupts means the buyer doesn't understand the technical
solution is not the whole solution.

In effect, regardless of the wrapper, unless you have the original 1959
first episode of Rocky and Bullwinkle, you probably can't answer those
trivia question correctly.  If you don't have the authentication and
authorization, you don't have access to the original source.  If you don't
have the digital signature and checksum technology, I can't trust your
answers without the original sources.  This is the real problem of named
data sharing.  Otherwise, URIs with registries make the name sharing easy,
and the rest is authentication, authorization, signatures, etc.   I don't
think the problem of discoverability is as big as the speaker believes it
is.

It isn't just trust.  It's verification.  For that, you must have an
authentic copy of the original source or access which amounts to the same
thing but if access, you have to prove that.  Names alone won't make that
happen.

len


From: vos-d-bounces at interreality.org [mailto:vos-d-bounces at interreality.org]
On Behalf Of Peter Amstutz

Well, on a technical level you have digital signatures that give you a 
technical way to verify that information from a given source has not 
been tampered with.  Provided you trust that the public key used to sign 
that data did in fact come from that entity, of course, but trust has to 
start somewhere.

On a social level, you're right, people tend to introduce errors (either 
accidentally or deliberately) in information.  There isn't a technical 
solution to that.  But that's not the kind of transmission we're dealing 
with; we're only concerned with exact digital copies.  Whether the 
source itself is an eyewitness account, a newpaper article or a 
wikipedia writeup, the goal is simply propagation of the actual digital 
document without allowing for the introduction of errors into the 
document itself.