Subject: Re: Use of "TAA" acronym (was Comments on LTANS documents)

From: Peter Sylvester <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 31 Jul 2004 12:29:42 +0200 (MEST)

I had already prepared some text concerning this point,
it is a little out of sync with jeff and larry's comment,
but anyway:

> >>As far as the WHAT is concerned, each of the previous players is trusting 
> >>the Arch-A for a different purpose which should be detailed.
> > 
> > 
> > I think that all players want that the archival service stores the data 
> > correctly and can make it available to whoever is authorized, or do I 
> > miss something? Trust is always a problematic word.  
> 
> The word "correctly" is problematic as well. S oit is necessary to have
> a defined unambigous set of rules, conditions that the verification
> gives always the some result.

Agreed. But where is the relationship to 'TRUST' ? Everybody trusts the
archive service or/and a notary to provide a service that follows a 
defined set of conditions. the submitter trusts that the data will be
stored and can be retrieved, a retriever that the data retrieved are the one 
stored by someone, i.e., the same. this does not mean that all players
always and all the time have the same level of trust vis-a-vis the
service provider. 

Or, one somehow has to compensate for the potential degradation in time
by some techniques that the service can use to demonstrate his inability
to create false positives, to deny having archived something, and to use
auditing to 'control' the service, combine with redundancy not operated
by the same people etc. 

We could name these beasts SAS "Secure Archive Service" .

Peter