None the less people could flood boards now, it's just that the software stops requesting keys if they don't seem to be there or get tagged as spam or blocked by the user. We could just do the same thing. Then worst case scenario, we have what we have now.
You can build boards that can not be flooded with the existing key types. There is a board/list owner that decides who is able to post. Similar to earlier proposals new identities can be obtained for hash cash or think cash. And the list owner drops identies of flooders/spammers. The difference is that the number of (sucessful and failed) requests only linearly grows with the number of messages and not with the number of list members. The damage (number of unnecessary requests) a list member can cause is limited to the logarihm of the number of list members to the base of two. (You do not have to be a list member in order to read the list.) The drawback is that there can be key collisions like with the current Frost.
Here is who it works:
The list owner regularly publishes: - the archiv of the messages that he recieved during the last period. This is for the convenience of readers and in order to inform posters of key collisions with other inserts. - a balanced binary tree of public keys. The leaves are the public keys of the list members. The keys of the inner tree nodes are generated by the list owner and each is used for exactly one insert. - the corresponding tree of private keys. The private keys of the leaves are missing of course. And the other ones are encrypted in a way, that only allows each list member to decypher the keys corresponding to the tree nodes on the way to the root of the tree.
You retrieve the messages by reqeusting all the SSKs of the public key starting from the root of the tree. When there is a DNF on a path, stop descending the path. So for n successful requests we will have n+1 failed requests. The public keys in the leave nodes of the tree are handled in a special way. The current period of time (as defined by the list owner) must be added to the SSK and an edition number starting by one. The mailing list client (Frost) should download higher editions, if and when the user considers the previous messages of the poster interesting.
In order to send a message to the list, a list member must find the first free SSK from the root on the path to the tree node with his key. Because he knows the private key of the SSK, he can insert his message under it.
You join a board by finding the private key to a yet unused SSK in the tree. Then you append your self-generated public key to your first post to the list, so that the list owner can properly add you to the list. Until then you just use the "cracked" SSK.
For that purpose the list owner generates some identities (=keypairs) and publishes hints for guessing the private keys (hash cash or think cash).
-- Thomas
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