The following is a quotation supplied by Marc Waldman.

Publius: A censorship resistant, tamper evident and fault tolerant WWW publishing system

The current architecture of the World Wide Web (WWW) doesn't easily lend itself to censor resistant, anonymous publication. Published documents have a URL that can be traced back to a specific Internet host and usually a specific author. However there are many reasons why someone might wish to publish something anonymously. Among the more noble of these reasons is is political dissent or "whistleblowing".

Most of the previous work in anonymous WWW publishing has been done in the context of building a system to realize Anderson's Eternity Service - a file server based storage medium that is resistant to denial of service attacks and physical destruction of most participating file servers. In the Eternity Service an author could anonymously publish a document by simply uploading it to a file server along with a storage fee and the document would then be replicated and distributed across the participating file servers.

We describe a system that implements many ideas central to the Eternity Service and builds on that work by adding mechanisms for tamper evidence, document updating, publishing mutually hyperlinked documents and storage management.

The project home page is www.cs.nyu.edu/waldman/publius. An article on Publius appeared in the Washington Post. A link to the article can be found on the project home page.

BIO: Marc Waldman is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department at New York University. His research interests include computer security and privacy-enhancing technologies. He received a BA and MS in Computer Science from New York University.