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Farsite: federated, available, and reliable storage for an incompletely trusted environment

Published: 31 December 2002 Publication History

Abstract

Farsite is a secure, scalable file system that logically functions as a centralized file server but is physically distributed among a set of untrusted computers. Farsite provides file availability and reliability through randomized replicated storage; it ensures the secrecy of file contents with cryptographic techniques; it maintains the integrity of file and directory data with a Byzantine-fault-tolerant protocol; it is designed to be scalable by using a distributed hint mechanism and delegation certificates for pathname translations; and it achieves good performance by locally caching file data, lazily propagating file updates, and varying the duration and granularity of content leases. We report on the design of Farsite and the lessons we have learned by implementing much of that design.

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cover image ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review  Volume 36, Issue SI
OSDI '02: Proceedings of the 5th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation
Winter 2002
398 pages
ISSN:0163-5980
DOI:10.1145/844128
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 31 December 2002
Published in SIGOPS Volume 36, Issue SI

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