Presence and IntComm WG

[Deke Kassabian <>]

--On Wednesday, February 18, 2004 6:47 PM -0500 Candace Holman 
<> wrote:

> We started this discussion to talk about the social controversy space in
> technology decisions that are being made for PIC/ALS, and collect some
> ideas for a paper.  I'm new to this list, but expected more argument.
>
> Jeremy said:
> "...the centralized architecture favors the government in that it has
> a single point to tap with an appropriate court order.  The latter [edge
> architecture] presents a technical barrier to that law enforcement
> approach.  Each stakeholder has a clearly defined interest and each of
> the architectures
> tilts the field."
>
> Let me become his devil's advocate, but anyone can answer these
> questions. What kind of privacy can you provide with an edge server that
> doesn't work on a central server of similar design?   Tell me more about
> the technical barrier to law enforcement.  What would prevent the
> government from asking the service provider to provide a point to tap on
> the edge server?  What are the details?  What if the hackers wanted to do
> the tapping, is each type of server secured by the same means?

Great questions.  But I think I'll talk around them rather than try to
"answer" them.  :)

Distributed services have the downside of distributed complexity and, 
depending
on who manages the distributed systems, varying service levels.

One of the nice properties of distributed services is the distribution of
service zones or fault zones.  A service that is provided by many edge
servers rather than a small number of central servers has different service
properties and in particular has different "failure" modes.  One possible
failure is the failure of user-expected confidentiality.  A small number of
central servers might be expected to each have a larger number of users
than in a more distributed model (for the same total number of users).  A
confidentiality failure (a wire-tap, a certain sort of cracking, an
unscrupulous sysadmin) probably has more "collateral damage" in the central
server case than in the distributed edge server case.  That is, if the
target was the communications of one user of the system, its easy to
imagine disclosure of communications information for some or all other
users of that system, too.

-------
Deke Kassabian,  Senior Technology Director
Information Systems and Computing, Networking and Telecommunications
University of Pennsylvania   <URL:http://www.net.isc.upenn.edu/~deke>