We begin our discussion of requirements for anonymous storage by enumerating the parties in an anonymous storage system. Information is stored in units called documents.
The author of a document is the entity which initially created the document. The publisher of a document is the entity which places the document into the system. Documents may have readers, which are entities who retrieve the document from the system. An anonymous storage system may have servers, which are participants who provide special services required to keep the system running, such as dedicated disk space or bandwidth.