Week 1: Introductions

On Day 1 I read papers on SFSRO and tried to learn about Merkel trees. We had a meeting discussing administrative things as well as what the Gnocchi/noSSL project would be about. It can be summarized in one phrase: "Protect content, not connections." Days 2-5 were mostly the same thing: Reading research papers to learn what was going on. I reread Fu's paper on SFSRO to get as strong of an understanding as possible and thought about how it could be implemented in a Chrome extension client. Since I knew no Javascript, I had to learn a bit of the language (as well as how to write Chrome extensions) so that I could understand what its capabilities were and contribute towards the development of the client. That was sorta fun- Javascript seems to be syntactically a bit similar to C++. Looking into GSS, I figured out that at best it's only another crypto API that we could use, but the basic underlying idea is pretty good: Seal, Encrypt, Send; Receive, Decrypt, Verify. I also delved into the Plutus file system which is sort of similar to SFSRO. Finally, I looked into openSSL code for a day. It is NASTY. The unique thing about SFSRO is that it is pretty good for supporting read/append only. I'm still trying to imagine how that would work in real-life examples such as social media, though. Unfortunately, nothing exciting yet has happened. We still have to come up with a specification for the project....