Tamias: A Privacy Aware Distributed Storage

Abstract

In this paper we present Tamias, a new distributed storage system. Tamias has identity and privacy at its core and builds upon it to bring fine-grained sharing features, delegation and revocation. It is can be used upon any lowlevel distributed storage that has full encryption outside the client. An identity is defined by a public-key that is circulated by the user among other users to introduce himself. In such a situation, introduction is an important step, and out-of-band is always going to be the safest bet. However, we also defined several optional in-band introduction mechanisms. Users can publish information about themselves, solicit other users with a self-introduction, and recommend users they trust to a third party. Finally, using public-key cryptography mechanisms, they can establish secure communication channels that allow to share objects safely within the Tamias storage system. Such a storage is a key piece of technology required by anyone who is privacy conscious, wants to make private online backups, or who is generally worried about Cloud-like online systems taking away their personal data.

Publication
9th USENIX Conference on File and Storage (FAST'11)
Cristel Pelsser
Cristel Pelsser
Critical embedded systems, Computer networking, Researcher, Professor

The focus of my research is on network operations, routing, Internet measurements, protocols and security.