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%META:TOPICINFO{author="IanClarke" date="1013974680" format="1.0" version="1.1"}% %META:TOPICPARENT{name="WebHome"}%

Glossary: Subspace

A simplistic way to look at Freenet is as a filesystem, where anyone can save a file under a filename of their choice, and anyone else, given the filename, can load the file, but unlike a file system, you cannot modify or overwrite a file in Freenet, and Freenet will only retain a file for so-long as it is popular.

Imagine you wanted to publish a daily newspaper using this mechanism. One way to do this would be to insert every edition under a name (aka "Freenet key") consisting of the name of your newspaper, and today's date, for example "the freenet times-17022002". This is nice because people always know what key they need to request to get the latest edition of your newspaper.

Unfortunately there is a problem, which is that someone who wanted to annoy you could simply publish a fake edition of your newspaper under tomorrow's key, and there would be nothing you can do about it. In fact, if they really wanted to annoy you, they could insert a fake edition under every key for the next 100 years!

Freenet's subspace mechanism attempts to address this problem, by allowing people to create private "namespaces" to which only they can write. This is achieved using public/private key cryptography by creating a new type of Freenet-key which contains both a public key, and a descriptive text string, for example:

9G4s%7EjLQJB7ALQg-v2q5xKAJy9YPAgM/FreenetTimes-17022002
Freenet nodes will check to make sure that any file under this Freenet key will be accompanied by a signature, made using the private key which corresponds to the public key. This means that only the creator of the public key (ie. the holder of the corresponding private key), is the only person who can insert data under keys beginning with 9G4s%7EjLQJB7ALQg-v2q5xKAJy9YPAgM/.

This means that you can now create a secure namespace within Freenet into which you can publish your newspaper without needing to worry about whether someone else can insert a fake edition under tomorrow's key.


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Revision r1.1 - 17 Feb 2002 - 19:38 GMT - IanClarke
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