Proplets -- Devices for Controlling Property

Copyright (c) 2001 by Nick Szabo
redistribution without permission of the author prohibited 

Civilization has highly evolved practices for determining whether certain actions are allowable or not, or who should prevail in a dispute, namely law. Such a body of knowledge cannot be reinvented from scratch, so instead e-commerce security should draw heavily on it -- building property rights, contract and tort law into technology at a very basic level. Proplets define the basic security architecture for local evidence gathering, enforcement, and negotiation of such laws.

Proplets do not rely on central planning, AI, or a single trusted third party for any function. Central planning is not able to account for the distributed and diverse knowledge and preferences of different people. A "trusted third party" is a nice-sounding synonym for a wide-open security hole that a designer chooses to overlook. Proplet design places strong emphasis on eliminating such exposures.

The key is building in, at the most basic level of technology, code (in both the legal and software sense) that allows a widely distributed people, each person having his own unique information, circumstances, and preferences, to cooperate within well known, mutually agreeable, and strongly enforced constraints. With these constraints the risks and benefits of technology are balanced, weapons are monitored and securely restricted in their use to only very narrow, specific, lawful conditions, and for every person there is more profit from peace than from destruction.

The goal of proplet design is to control physical objects with digital protocols. Proplets protect its structure and function from non-owners, and observe the environment for phenomena impinging on a region, on matter, or on its owner. A proplet is an electromechanical device (e.g. a MEMS device) with the following core abilities:

A proplet may optionally also have the following abilities:

No computational module can be read or controlled by physical tampering -- it will shut down, erase itself, or even self-destruct depending on the severity of tampering. Computational modules are "transparent" to their publically registered controller and opaque to other entities.

Only protocols that are simple and composable with provable security govern the communications between the security kernel (private key operations), control box, sandbox, and other components of a computation modules. Similarly for communications between modules and between proplets.

How does a proplet find out who owns it, or a guest module who controls it? There are two basic ways:

A proplet's guest modules are publicly listed and transferred independently of each other and of the proplet's ownership module.

With the home proplet alternative, biometric control of the home proplets may replace public ownership records.

Proplets control electronics directly from ownership or guest modules. Proplets control machinery via entanglement. Entanglement can take at least two forms:

Entanglment designs have in common that they make it too expensive for the attacker to steal the electronics or machinery by severing it from the controlling proplet.

Tort

Deeds, in the context of replicated property titles and proplets, are smart contracts executed by a deed module. The current owner may add new deeds agreed to (but not remove old ones) by drafting signing and signing such a smart contract with other current property owners. The deed binds both properties (perhaps to different terms, depending on what the two current owners have negotiatied). The deed modules can be audited at any time by the contemporary owners of other proplets bound to the deeds. Founders of competing property title registries define master deeds, or tort laws, to govern disputes within registry properties. They also define tort law for disputes between their properties and properties defined by other registires, by coming to agreements with those registry founders. Founders also create the initial allocations.

Founders are often the manufacturers of proplets. They build in a particular registry as authoratative for their proplets as well as designing an accompanying tort law.

For example, the founder of registry of fixtures in a spatial region can sign an agreement with a movable property (chattel) registry, governing the behavior of chattel moving through space and interacting with fixtures. The manufacturers of chattel and fixtures program their proplets to respect the appropriate registries and constrain their sensors and effectors to follow the tort law that has been agreed to.

Conclusion

Proplets combine our most highly evolved practices for cooperation on a large scale with a technology architecture suitable for advances well into the future, even well into posthuman civilization. Proplets provide a much sounder footing for solving the problems of high technology cooperation including problems such as privacy, weapons of mass destruction, and other abuses of the power of advanced technology.

References


Computer Security as the Future of Law, Mark Miller
Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks, Nick Szabo
Secure Property Titles, Nick Szabo

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Gregory Burch, J.D. for his helpful questions.

 
 
 


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