CANE: The Content Addressed Network Environment

TL;DR

CANE proposes a content-addressed network environment that emphasizes identity and trust, aiming to address core issues of authenticity, privacy, and fragmentation in the current internet infrastructure.

Contribution

It introduces a novel content-addressed network model that abstracts location, emphasizes cryptographic identity verification, and unifies file storage with network access.

Findings

CANE offers a simplified environment focusing on identity over location.

It demonstrates improved trust and privacy features.

Potential for unifying file storage and network access.

Abstract

The fragmented nature and asymmetry of local and remote file access and network access, combined with the current lack of robust authenticity and privacy, hamstrings the current internet. The collection of disjoint and often ad-hoc technologies currently in use are at least partially responsible for the magnitude and potency of the plagues besetting the information economy, of which spam and email borne virii are canonical examples. The proposed replacement for the internet, Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6), does little to tackle these underlying issues, instead concentrating on addressing the technical issues of a decade ago. This paper introduces CANE, a Content Addressed Network Environment, and compares it against current internet and related technologies. Specifically, CANE presents a simple computing environment in which location is abstracted away in favour of identity, and trust is explicitly defined. Identity is cryptographically verified and yet remains pervasively open in nature. It is argued that this approach is capable of being generalised such that file storage and network access can be unified and subsequently combined with human interfaces to result in a Unified Theory of Access, which addresses many of the significant problems besetting the internet community of the early 21st century.