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Lavinia: An Audit-Payment Protocol for Censorship-Resistant Storage

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Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 10322))

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Abstract

As distributed storage systems grow in popularity, there is now a demand for a reliable incentive and payment system to guarantee and reward the pristine storage of documents. However, many existing proof-of-retrieval and micropayment protocols are not secure in a censorship resistance setting, in which powerful adversaries may infiltrate a system or coerce the original publisher to remove content. Additionally, most existing censorship resistance systems lack a rigorous game-theoretic analysis. We propose Lavinia, an audit and payment protocol for censorship-resistant storage. Lavinia incentivizes document availability by providing micropayments to participating servers in exchange for honestly storing and serving content. Our protocol enables the implementation of a digital printing press as described in Anderson’s Eternity Service: allowing the publisher, as opposed to public interest or an appointed editorial board, to decide whether a document is worth storing, and for how long. In addition to proving the security of our protocol, we provide an in-depth game-theoretic analysis and show that self-interested participants of our system will faithfully implement the desired behaviour and continue to store documents until their expiration date.

An extended version of this paper is available as a technical report [6].

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Although many DHTs are vulnerable to Eclipse [7] or Sybil attacks [12], we note that securing DHT join and lookup protocols is an active area of research [4, 7, 24] and is outside the scope of this paper.

  2. 2.

    https://bitcoin.org/.

  3. 3.

    We consider the impact of malicious servers in the next section.

  4. 4.

    http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte-update.

  5. 5.

    https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-around-the-world/.

  6. 6.

    Note that we assume the presence of a secure routing protocol, in which there are protections against servers reporting incorrect routing information [7].

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Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers for helping us to improve this work. We thank NSERC for grant STPGP-463324.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Cecylia Bocovich & Ian Goldberg

  2. New College of Florida, Sarasota, FL, USA

    John A. Doucette

Authors
  1. Cecylia Bocovich
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Cecylia Bocovich .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Aggelos Kiayias

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© 2017 International Financial Cryptography Association

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Bocovich, C., Doucette, J.A., Goldberg, I. (2017). Lavinia: An Audit-Payment Protocol for Censorship-Resistant Storage. In: Kiayias, A. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10322. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70972-7_34

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70972-7_34

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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