On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 10:27 PM, ianG <i...@iang.org> wrote: > AFAIK, the term 'least authority' as used by Tahoe-LAFS folks does not > refer to 'zero knowledge' as per cryptographic protocols, but to the > concept of least authority as derived from the 'capabilities' school of > security thought. >
I strongly agree that capabilities are quite important to the Tahoe-LAFS idea of least authority, and I have been following the project for many years. But I think the Tahoe style of least authority and end-to-end encryption go hand-in-hand. Tahoe's capabilities are crypto capabilities, a.k.a. "capabilities as keys". The capability tokens are the cryptographic keys themselves. This means the entire storage system is opaque to anyone who doesn't hold at least a readcap. The system, by design, deals only in ciphertext. It's ciphertext all the way down After the launch of MEGA, I've seen several sites (e.g. SpiderOak) trying to claim to be the first to have invented this concept. I don't know who did it first, but I'm pretty sure Tahoe was the first to actually get it right. -- Tony Arcieri
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