[tahoe-dev] Announcing Tamias based on Tahoe-LAFS

[Jean Lorchat]

Good news everyone !

I am writing this message to announce that we have made the first public 
very-beta release of our project called Tamias (a private&secure 
storage), which is based on Tahoe-LAFS. This is sent primarily to the 
developer community of Tahoe because it is not going to be an easy to 
use thing before long and we do not have lots of resources here to 
dedicate to support.

The rest is mostly about history of the project, so you can skip to the 
end if you just want the URLs.

So, this project started from a suggestion by Randy (Bush), that he 
received himself by Steve (Bellovin), who learned about Tahoe somewhere. 
Some people might have noticed a poster we brought to Usenix FAST in 
February this year, or heard about the project at various gatherings.

Our goal was to build a distributed storage that would have a very 
fine-grained control over sharing, and allow people to build their own 
storage network by putting disk space together. After learning about 
Tahoe, we came to the conclusion that it was a very sound piece of work 
and that it had some properties exactly similar to what we were pursuing.

The goal was then to build on top of Tahoe something that is both user 
friendly and allows to manage capabilities. By 'manage capabilities' we 
mean a way to store them in a single place much like you can use an 
alias in the Tahoe CLI. But we also mean being able to scope these 
things to a single destination, and then to allow delegation.

In the end, we decided to introduce some kind of identity support by 
associating users with (at least one) pair of private/public keys. These 
keys allow to construct the URI of the Tamias 'root' folder where 
everything is stored. We also added some protection mechanism to prevent 
unauthorized people from hijacking 'secured' capabilities by having the 
remote server refuse to serve the blocks.

It was a sort of big hack on Tahoe 1.8.0 for a long time, until we got 
to the point where it doesn't look so bad that people can see it. We 
also synchronized with Tahoe 1.9.0 (thanks to Brian for the git bridge 
btw) and here we are.

You can read more stuff about it on the Tamias website here: 
https://tamias.iijlab.net/?p=43

We do know that the tarball is a mess (there are so many hacks here and 
there), especially the way we 'package' pycryptopp, but I would be happy 
to contribute the changes in the near future. They only involve being 
able to create an encrypting key and a decrypting key (from public and 
private key respectively) so it should be no big deal.

Happy end of year,
Jean