Bibliography – Tahoe-LAFS

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Version 23 (modified by zooko, at 2008-08-01T15:16:56Z) (diff)
add link to defectoscopy

Here are some papers that are potentially of interest.

Crypto

Symmetric Primitives

Salsa20 Design a fast and secure cipher

Salsa20 Security Arguments why Salsa20 is probably safe against this and that threat

EnRUPT a very simple, fast, and flexible primitive which could be used as stream cipher, secure hash function, or MAC (the first two are primitives that we currently need, and the third one -- MAC -- is a primitive that we may want in the future) and which relies for its security on a large number of rounds. The question of how many rounds to use is decided by semi-automated cryptanalysis.

defectoscopy.com a table of semi-automated cryptanalysis results from the inventors of EnRUPT. This technique is not well accepted by the mainstream of cryptographers. I (Zooko) can't judge how valid it is. Note that Tiger is one of only two hash functions that are predicted to be secure by this analysis -- the other is Whirlpool. MD-4/5, SHA-0/1/2, and GOST are predicted to be insecure.

Elliptic Curve Cryptography

ECC Brainpool Standard Curves and Curve Generation new elliptic curve parameters which come with a proof that they were generated deterministically and pseudorandomly from the first few bits of pi, as well as proofs that they are immune to certain other potential cryptographic weaknesses.

Endomorphisms for faster elliptic curve cryptography on general curves techniques to compute elliptic curve cryptography significantly faster in software.

Secure Hash Functions

Some thoughts on Collision Attacks in the Hash Functions MD5, SHA-0 and SHA-1 general musings about design of secure hash functions

Erasure Coding

http://www.cs.utk.edu/~plank/plank/gflib/index.html : A tutorial and some software for erasure coding. This isn't the software that we use because it isn't as fast as Rizzo's implementation, but the tutorial is nice.

Local Filesystems

Model-Based Failure Analysis of Journaling File Systems PDF compares ext3, reiserfs, and JFS under conditions of latent sector errors. (Impatient people: read the Introduction and look at the table on page 9.)

IRON Filesystems PDF, a follow-on by the authors of "Model-Based Failure Analysis of Journaling File Systems" examines how ext3, reiserfs, xfs, and ntfs handle various sorts of errors (impatient people, see table on page 8, "File System Summary" on page 9, and table on page 10).

Using Model Checking to Find Serious File System Errors PDF analyzes ext3, JFS, and reiserfs (impatient: page 10).

eXplode: A lightweight, general approach for finding serious errors in storage systems, a follow-on by the authors of "Using Model Checking to Find Serious File System Errors", compares ext2, ext3, reiserfs, reiser4, jfs, xfs, msdos, vfat, hfs, and hfs+ to see if you sync them and then crash them if your allegedly synced data is actually recoverable (impatient: page 11)

P2P / Distributed Systems / Decentralization

Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-value Store -- sophisticated distributed hash table polished by extensive high-performance practical usage; An excellent paper!

Fixing the Embarrassing Slowness of OpenDHT on PlanetLab (2005) -- practical lessons in DHT performance that theoreticians learned by deployment

Non-Transitive Connectivity and DHTs -- practical lessons in dealing with not-fully-connected DHTs that theoreticians learned in deployment

POST: A Secure, Resilient, Cooperative Messaging System -- use a DHT for messaging; includes a suggestion to ameliorate the confidentiality problems of single-instance store by adding random bits to small text messages

A brief history of Consensus, 2PC and Transaction Commit. -- a web page summarizing the evolution of the academic theory of decentralized, reliable systems.

Measurement and Analysis of TCP Throughput Collapse in Cluster-based Storage Systems -- Hm... Could this happen to us?