Security

Here at the Virtual Alexandria Project, security is of the utmost importance. We conceive of security in four tiers: User, Contributor, Information, and Platform.

User Security
The historical Alexandria was a wonder to behold, a place where people from around the world could come to bask in the cultural resources from half a hundred worlds. Such a pilgrimage of knowledge cannot work if the pilgrims get picked off along the way. Because Virtual Alexandria is hosted in "private" Umbral space, students of the library need not fear attack while engrossed in their studies. The concern for user safety is our primary reason for not having total open access.

Contributor Security
The vision of Alexandria is also predicated on the broad contribution of many thinkers. We, therefore, take seriously the protection of the identity of our contributors. All transfers to the library are done using the most secure means. We use a revolutionary method of encryption, as well as mobile data transmission centers and other industry strategies to maintain anonymity. In fact, we use other strategies as well, but we aren't going to talk about them so they are harder to bypass. We make it so that writing for our library is never any more dangerous than knowing the thing in the first place.

Information Security
Not all information is meant for all eyes. Much of the world would be better if physicists would have been a little more occultish. The Virtual Alexandria Project houses knowledge that is even more dangerous than knowledge of the atomic bomb. As such, we do not allow all users to access all stacks. Our policy is for the contributors to set their own security policies with regard to their contributions. This allows orders to store data that only other members of the order can access. Of course we encourage contributors to make open what knowledge should be openly shared. But the Virtual Alexandria Project is about storing all the world's knowledge, not spewing it dangerously about.

Platform Security
Finally, the Virtual Alexandria Project attends to platform security, which is to say, the safety and robustness of the database itself. This is paramount, as the Virtual version of this library wouldn't be necessary if the first library's curators had thought more about security. This is one of the reasons the new library is hosted in an Umbral realm, which can be heavily warded and shrouded in dreamshell. We have the explicit aim to outlast the original Alexandrian Library, and are always pushing for more secure forms of data storage and platform maintenance.