Giving Upspin a spin

Posted Mar 9, 2017 9:08 UTC (Thu) by xav (guest, #18536)
Parent article: Giving Upspin a spin

Really nice, but the centralized key server is a weakness point IMHO. Not from a reliability point-of-view (I trust Google can run a server) but from a privacy one: there's just one point where someone can plug and observe all requests for keys from one user to another.
See https://github.com/upspin/upspin/issues/216

Giving Upspin a spin

Posted Mar 12, 2017 11:03 UTC (Sun) by HIGHGuY (subscriber, #62277) [Link] (2 responses)

That keyserver should be replaced by a blockchain.
All transactions can surely be mapped to an equivalent operation, giving more control, privacy and security.

Giving Upspin a spin

Posted Mar 12, 2017 16:41 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

Also *far* higher resource consumption (CPU due to proof-of-work, disk space and network bandwidth due to storing the thing) and probably a very low system-wide maximum transaction rate, at least if blockchains are implemented anything like the Bitcoin one.

Blockchains are not a good fit for this problem. (They look like a terrible fit, actually. Why do you need nonrepudiability of fs operations? Why do you need it so much that you're willing to pay blockchain's enormous costs?)

Giving Upspin a spin

Posted Mar 12, 2017 18:58 UTC (Sun) by HIGHGuY (subscriber, #62277) [Link]

I'm only talking about the key servers, everything else is fine as is. It also doesn't exclude central servers doing some form of caching.