iTrust: Trustworthy information publication, search and retrieval

Peter Michael Melliar-Smith*, Louise E. Moser, Isai Michel Lombera, Yung-Ting Chuang

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

17 Scopus citations

Abstract

The iTrust system is a decentralized and distributed information publication, search and retrieval system, whose objective is to prevent censorship and filtering of information accessed over the Internet. In iTrust, metadata describing information are randomly distributed to multiple participating nodes. Similarly, requests containing keywords are randomly distributed to multiple participating nodes. If a participating node receives a request and the keywords in the request match the metadata it holds, the participating node sends the URL for the information to the requesting node. The requesting node then can retrieve the information from the source node. In this paper, we present the iTrust messaging and membership protocols. We establish lower bounds for the probabilities of a match if all of the participating nodes are operational and if a proportion of the participating nodes are non-operational or subverted. We provide probabilistic results for n participating nodes, where the metadata and the requests are distributed to a multiple of the square root of n nodes. These results show that distribution of the metadata and the requests to relatively few nodes suffices to achieve a high probability of a match, even if some of the nodes are non-operational or subverted.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationDistributed Computing and Networking - 13th International Conference, ICDCN 2012, Proceedings
Pages351-366
Number of pages16
DOIs
StatePublished - 2012
Event13th International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking, ICDCN 2012 - Hong Kong, China
Duration: 3 Jan 20126 Jan 2012

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume7129 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference13th International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking, ICDCN 2012
Country/TerritoryChina
CityHong Kong
Period3/01/126/01/12

Keywords

  • Internet
  • censorship
  • iTrust
  • publication
  • retrieval
  • search

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