Re: [Monotone-devel] encrypted monotone (and digression on

[Jeronimo Pellegrini]

On Sun, Jul 09, 2006 at 12:10:42PM -0700, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
> Just noticed this project:
>   http://aleph0.info/apso/
> Early stages, but might interest some people here.

Er... That page is terribly outdated. The project has gone through many
changes after I set up the page.
And I'm curious to know how you got that link, since I only told 5
guys about it.  :-)

I will try to update it later, but I am really busy these days, so
I'm not sure when I'll be able to do that.

> Currently proprietary licensed, though the webpage claims that will
> change.

I am trying to understand the implications of sayin "GPL v2 or a later
version". GPL v3 seems to have problems with cryptography (and in
particular, that project can be used to hide source code, which is
something RMS would not like, I guess)
If it's released as "v2 or later", then someone writes a plugin and
releass it under v3, and well, I'm not sure that would be good.

> I haven't looked at their technique yet; my plan to do something like
> this was to just teach mtn-dumb how to wrap encryption around each of
> its packets, and HMAC its merkle keys.  The advantage is that mtn-dumb
> is transport only; you can't get nearly so much encryption if you have
> to be able to do fancy VCS operations like finding heads, where you
> need indexing, etc.  So it's actually a good thing in an encrypted
> store if the only things it supports are push and pull.

What I did was to encrypt packets and store them in another database.
For other VC systems, I plan to encrypt deltas and any meta-information
necessary to rebuild the database.

> (I've been thinking about encrypted storage because I've been getting
> increasingly frustrated at moving files around by hand between
> desktop/laptop/school, and thinking how to write a runs-in-background,
> I-don't-have-to-think-about-it, promiscuously-communicating eager file
> transmitter, and the obvious solution is to use some simple wrappers
> around monotone.  But then you want to be able to use an untrusted
> host as a rendezvous point.

Exactly! :-)

J.