For-credit UROP and AUP positions available in the Free Haven Project 
(http://freehaven.net/), starting immediately.

The Free Haven Project aims to deploy a system for distributed anonymous
data storage which is robust against attempts by powerful adversaries to
find and destroy any stored data.  Some of the problems Free Haven
addresses include providing sufficient accountability without
sacrificing anonymity, providing persistent content-neutral storage, and
building trust between servers based entirely on their observed
behavior.

Free Haven remains largely a student-run project, started as MEng and
AUP research under Professor Ron Rivest.  Due to the recent rise in
public awareness of peer-to-peer systems, the project has gained more
wide-spread interest:  we've contributed two chapters to the upcoming
O'Reilly publiction Peer-to-Peer
(http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/peertopeer/).

Student research this term will be supervised by Professor Frans
Kaashoek (for projects involving more applied/implementation issues),
and by Professor Rivest (for more theoretical topics, although to a
lesser extent, as he is officially on sabbatical this year.)

If you are interested in one or more:

  - security, cryptography
  - distributed systems ("peer-to-peer")
  - privacy, anonymity
  - reputation systems

then this project could very well interest you!
Relevant courses at MIT include:

  - 6.033 (6.894), 6.857 (6.875), 6.170

But sufficiently motivated students might not require such background.
Realistically, the scope and depth of UROP/AUP projects is limited only
by student interest and willingness to learn.   

If interested, please send an email and resume by Wednesday, January 31.
The work is really fun and exciting stuff, bleeding-edge technological
development, and has an important and significant moral/ethical basis.

--mike