People have come to depend on information from the Internet and the Web and, in many aspects of their lives, now rely on the Internet to deliver that information. This research addresses the trustworthy distri bution and retrieval of information within a network, in particular the Internet. Specifically, it concerns the distribution of metadata and requests, matching of requests and metadata, and retrieval of information corresponding to the metadata. In the Internet today, this functionality is provided by centralized search engines and search indexes. The free flow of information through such centralized mechanisms depends on benign and unbiased administrators of those mechanisms. Unfortunately, the experience of history, and even of today, shows that we cannot depend on the administrators to remain benign and unbiased in the future. The existence of an alternative to centralized search, an effective distributed search, without centralized mechanisms and without centralized control, is an important assurance to the users of the Internet that a small group of individuals cannot prevent them from distributing their ideas and information and from retrieving ideas and information from others. The development of a trustworthy information distribution and retrieval network is essential for the NSF Trustworthy Computing Program.
{pmms, moser, ytchuang, imichel} @ ece.ucsb.edu
