Communities Against Terrorism

1
Communities AgainstTerrorism

• Norm Schryer, FDIS, 8/13/2002

2
What terrorists do

• Find your machine
• Break into it
• Search it for interesting items
• Use it to attack other machines
• Trash it when done

3
We are un-protected

• Each of our machines is alone
• An attack means loss of everything

4
How to protect yourself
Colonial Americans formed associations to protect
themselves Fire brigades Fire and Life
Insurance Societies
We need to do the same for our computers

• Hide your machine in a Crowd
• Publish your precious items there

5
Proposal
Form an Association of colleagues, friends,
neighbors, etc Your machine is anonymous in the
Association The tool proposed is based on
Crowds Publish your important information in
the Association Loss of several machines leaves
the Association intact The tool proposed is
Publius An Association of 10-12 folks is plenty
secure and easy to start As an Association
grows, so does its security
6
CROWDS
To hide your machine, join a Crowd.
See Michael K. Reiter and Aviel
Rubin, Crowds Anonymity for Web
transactions, ACM Transactions on Information
System Security, April 1(1), 1998 or, to get
the Postscript or PDF on-line http//www.avirubin
.com Just above Books click click
here. Under Refereed Journal
Publications click on the Crowds ps.gz or pdf
links. Even if 1/3 of the machines in your Crowd
are compromised, your anonymity is preserved. The
terrorists cannot find you.
7
PUBLIUS
Publius Securely distributes information among
machines Loss of many machines does not result
in information loss http//cs.nyu.edu/waldman/p
ublius/ Information published via Publius is
extremely difficult for a terrorist to modify or
remove. Also, the identity of the publisher is
protected. Even if many others machines are
attacked, terrorists cannot destroy your
distributed information or tell that you own it.