Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

A Move to Secure Data by Scattering the Pieces

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the can-you-find-me-now dept.

uler writes "The NY Times has an article about an interesting new open source storage project. Unlike data storage mechanisms today that work 'by making multiple copies of data,' the Cleversafe software takes an 'approach based on dispersing data in encrypted slices.' It's an elegant solution and one that's been a long time coming: the software uses algorithmic techniques known by mathematicians since the 70's. Adi Shamir (of RSA) first wrote of information dispersal is his 1979 paper 'How to Share a Secret (pdf).'"

6 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. Hmmm.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    PAR? PAR2?

    1. Re:Hmmm.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      PAR/PAR2 takes data, chunks it up, and adds RAID-like redundancey. Add a layer of compression for space savings, and these files can be scattered around the net (in fact, already are), and the original data can be reconstructed with a sub-set of the data, even if the sub-set is damaged. (within calculable limits of course)

      (wow, unintentional FP even...)

  2. Wasn't this Al Gore's idea? by andrewman327 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Although the goal was different, this is in the spirit of the creation of the Internet. DARPAnet was designed to scatter information to maintain communications. to use a different example it reminds me of RAID.


    With all of this encryption technology, people still need to remember basic security tips. Use good passwords ("password" could be cracked very quickly even with 128 bit AES), maintain physical security (hardware keyloggers can find out about the manifesto you're writing before you even save the file) and use common sense.


    Before you all ask, yes it does run Linux. The company was actually at Linuxworld.

    --
    Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
    1. Re:Wasn't this Al Gore's idea? by Detritus · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Although the goal was different, this is in the spirit of the creation of the Internet. DARPAnet was designed to scatter information to maintain communications.

      Cite? From what I've read about the original Arpanet, it was designed to allow the sharing of computer resources and data among DoD researchers. It wasn't designed to be a failure-tolerant network, although DARPA funded quite a bit of research in that area.

      --
      Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
  3. Like mnet? by haeger · · Score: 4, Insightful
    If I'm not mistaken, this was one of the goals with the (now dead?) mnet project.
    From what I remember they split up data into multiple pieces, encrypted it and distributed it over a number of nodes, with some redundancy in it. If you know python and are intrested in p2p I'm sure there's a lot to be learned from that project.

    .haeger

    --
    You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
  4. Re:Use more than one pad? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Using K one-time pads to encrypt data would be highly secure, but it would not be very reliable. Losing any one of the K one time pads would mean losing your data. It would also not be very efficient: the K one time pads would each take up as much space as the original file. The Cleversafe IDA can recover the data even if 5 out of 11 sites are irrecoverably destroyed making it highly reliable. Each slice is approximately 1/6th the size of the original data, meaning that all 11 slices take up about 11/6ths the size of the original data (equivealent to the storage requirements of making one copy). This is what makes IDA's so promising for storage, you get extreme reliability along with extreme efficiency.