[Vrs-development] Cluster image security/privacy question

[Eric Altendorf]

I was just reading the cluster image document at
        http://www.freesoftware.fsf.org/VRS/lds-detail.html

The following may be totally paranoid, but I bring it up since one of the 
stated goals of the VRS is to be able to safely share information which has 
been deemed inappropriate by a hostile social, religious, or governmental 
environment.

I'm wondering if in such an environment, it would be wise to *not* let each 
node hold the same cluster image, with information about all other nodes.  
Perhaps it would be best for each node to *only* explicitly know about a few 
other nodes, thus forming cluster subsets whose union is the entire cluster.  
The idea, of course, is that should one node be attacked in one form or 
another, and the cluster image be discovered, only the identity of a few 
nodes in the cluster would be revealed, as opposed to the identity of all 
participants.

I'm not sure if this is really an issue or not, and it is certainly a 
complication we may not want to address at this point.  I thought I'd bring 
it up, though.

Eric

-- 
"First they ignore you.  Then they laugh at you.
 Then they fight you.  And then you win."             -Gandhi