Question: central server, federated, or p2p? Answer: all!

There are many ideas of core architectures for providing digital services, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. I break it down along the lines of central servers, federated servers, and peer-to-peer, serverless systems. a central service with clients connecting to it Most big internet companies operate in effect as a central server (even though they are implemented differently). There is only facebook.com, there are no other services that can inter-operate with facebook. [Read More]

Keys, signatures, certificates, verifications, etc. What are all these for?

For the past two years, we have been thinking about how to make it easier for anyone to achieve private communications. One particular focus has been on the “security tokens” that are required to make private communications systems work. This research area is called internally Portable Shared Security Tokens aka PSST. All of the privacy tools that we are working on require “keys” and “signatures”, to use the language of cryptography, and these are the core of what “security tokens” are. [Read More]