

Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe (LOCKSS) - sublemonic
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/june/government-document-preservation-061410.html

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Kejistan
Can anyone elaborate on how this protects against tampering? It sounds like
you can't actually look at the LOCKSS copies unless the "live" source is down.
So long as the single "live" tampered copy doesn't go down it doesn't sound
like it offers any protection.

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stipes
The article is rather sparse on technical details. The homepage for LOCKSS is
<http://www.lockss.org/lockss/Home>.

It appears to use some sort of Byzantine fault tolerance in its auditing
system (to detect the fault and repair) spread across many "boxes" running the
system. There is also a manual audit process by librarians to check that
content is correct (this may handle cases where the "live" copies are
tampered).

For the most part (from what I can gather from their site), the system is a
kind of "self-audited" backup for live content, not for ensuring that that
live content is correct. So, for a document that you needed to keep correct
(given that a live copy may be tampered), you could simply not have a live
copy.

