Mastodon Feed: Post

Mastodon Feed

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
nasser@merveilles.town ("Ramsey Nasser") wrote:

me: distributed trust is tricky! I wonder how other distributed systems solve it

other distributed system: have you tried hard coding four men as the arbiters of trust

screenshot of a c2 wiki article, the relevant text is There is a set of users from which all trust flows (currently hardwired to be raph, miguel, federico, and alan). text in parentheses highlighted. the full text is: Advogato Trust Metric The TrustMetric used by AdvoGato. It is an example of a CapacityConstrainedFlowNetwork. From the user's point of view, it's pretty simple. When you create an account, you have very few privileges. However, you can 'certify' other people, and they can certify you. At present, the certification is simply a three-valued enum: Apprentice, Journeyer, or Master. This induces a nice big graph. The next step is automatic evaluation of the trust metric. There is a set of users from which all trust flows (currently hardwired to be raph, miguel, federico, and alan). The evaluation itself is essentially a network maximum flow solver, for which nice efficient algorithms exist. The people reached by the flow are those accepted by the trust metric. With the three levels, the maxflow is computed three times: once with just the Master certs, once with Master and Journeyer, and once with all three. Like all examples of a CapacityConstrainedFlowNetwork, the AdvogatoTrustMetric is robust against noisy or malicious cert data. It effectively blocks large numbers of people from being certified who don't meet the criteria. At the same time, people who do meet the criteria now routinely get certified within an hour of joining, thanks in part to the 'many ey...