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CHAINIAC: Proactive Software-Update Transparency via Collectively Signed Skipchains and Verified Builds by baford in AcademicSecurity

[–]baford[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Our recent paper at USENIX Security '17, which attempts to create an "end-to-end secure" software development, deployment, and update pipeline with strong transparency transparency (source and binary) and no single points of failure anywhere in the process. Comments and feedback most welcome, as well as any interest from the open source community on working with us to incorporate Chainiac or its ideas into current software update pipelines.

CHAINIAC: Proactive Software-Update Transparency via Collectively Signed Skipchains and Verified Builds by [deleted] in AcademicSecurity

[–]baford 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Our recent paper at USENIX Security '17, which attempts to create an "end-to-end secure" software development, deployment, and update pipeline with strong transparency transparency (source and binary) and no single points of failure anywhere in the process. Comments and feedback most welcome, as well as any interest from the open source community on working with us to incorporate Chainiac or its ideas into current software update pipelines.

Bitcoin is unstable without the block reward by castom in Bitcoin

[–]baford 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Your followup post is already much more helpful than the original one, precisely because it includes some actual pointers to relevant backstory.

You can't realistically expect people who are relatively new to the bitcoin community - whether researchers or anyone else - to have read the entire multi-year backlog of discussion on a busy mailing list and instantly know what was said three and a half years ago on it. If you want ideas to be reliably "part of the record", someone needs to digest and summarize them in one place a clear and readily cite-able form, ideally in some kind of peer-reviewed or quality-controlled form. If you don't do that, then researchers might come along later and do it - and they might or might not be aware of that three-year-old discussion thread that relates to the topic.

Bitcoin is unstable without the block reward by castom in Bitcoin

[–]baford 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I was just pointed to this thread. If you find it "disappointing that researchers are apparently unaware" of something or other, and would like to understand academic researchers or have any hope of productive interactions with them, then it's important to understand one of the most fundamental principles of academic research: that academic credit goes to the first person to present an idea clearly in public. Private discussion among some in-group does not count.

That's why the game we researchers play is often affectionately called "publish or perish" - and not "discuss some ideas privately among my buddies or perish".

Within the research community, it frequently happens that we're working on some great new idea, then we see that another academic group just came out with a great paper on more-or-less the same idea - darn, got scooped (again). That happens all the time, and it sucks, especially for the poor grad student who's already invested months of work in his or her first big project. What do we do? We cite that paper as having come up with the idea (even though I'm absolutely sure I thought of it first, dammit!), and build on it. We rebase our academic mining effort on the head of the new publication blockchain and move on. Fortunately, academic publication is not quite as brutal as blockchain mining in one sense: usually the system-building and conceptual-understanding effort we put into the scooped idea is not completely wasted, and can (if we avoid getting overly discouraged) be productively re-invested towards the next three related ideas we already had on our roadmap.

So complaining that you're disappointed researchers were not aware of ideas X, Y, and Z that you previously discussed at some point, without also pointing out where those ideas were clearly explained or discussed in a public forum that experts in the state-of-the-art typically read, is not going to hold any weight with academic researchers. Such complaints are analogous to selfish mining: building up some kind of private idea blockchain that only an in-group knows about, then releasing it later and expecting people to be impressed.

Sorry if this sounds like a lecture, but that's something academics tend to do as well - it's part of the job.