\chapter{Conclusions}

Free Haven provides a service that is not currently available from any
other project or application. Web pages available from the internet have
their source easily evident. Usenet articles do not reliably reach all
readers, and are subject to unpredictable expiration from disapproving
administrators or simply due to space constraints.

By providing a stable and distributed service for anonymous publishing
and anonymous reading, we provide dissidents with more powerful tools
for both communication and publication. We believe in -- and provide
-- a stronger notion of free speech than simply the ability to make
government-sanctioned statements. Overall, we believe that providing
individuals with the power to speak in a free, persistent, and untraceable
manner is well worth the risk that the system could also be used for
malicious or otherwise immoral activities.

Designing a good system for robust anonymous publication is hard.
Providing sufficient accountability without sacrificing this anonymity
is hard.  Designing a good communications channel is hard. Designing a
good trust system is hard.  Modelling and anticipating the capabilities
of future adversaries is hard.  Solving all of these problems for a
specific situation and then integrating the solutions into a robust
functional implementation is much harder still.

We have provided a good foundation for a solution to each of these
problems.  By deriving basic definitions and notions for anonymity in
a decentralized publishing system, and enumerating and addressing the
capabilities and attacks that an adversary might employ in trying to break
the system, we pave the road for a more thorough and broad approach to
analyzing the success and protection of various related works, including
Gnutella, Freenet, and Publius.

The Free Haven design is an important step toward answering a problem
which is not currently being addressed: namely the creation of a
strongly anonymous content-neutral decentralized publication system.
Whereas related projects currently provide at best incrementally
better anonymity relative to services like Napster, Free Haven provides
computational anonymity for all three agents of the system: publishers,
servers, and readers. We do not expect Free Haven to be as popular or
immediately useful as services like Freenet, where losing anonymity might
at worst spark a legal battle.  However, we do believe that a service
such as Free Haven is vital for foreign political dissidents and other
activists who do not have the luxury of failure.

