Security Considerations

This page exists so that there is one page to read to learn about the security guarantees that Tahoe is designed to provide, as well as about any current known issues that might have security consequences.

The Distributed Filesystem

Access Control

The Tahoe distributed filesystem is composed of files and directories. Each file has a unique and unguessable identifier, called a "CHK-URI". Possession of this identifier is necessary and sufficient to download, reconstruct, decrypt, and verify the integrity of the file. If a person is not given the CHK-URI, then they cannot see the

Traffic Analysis

To be filled in. Traffic analysis is subtle and powerful. For the moment, assume that if someone wants to, they can learn everything about your every act, including when were, and which file, by its unique identifier and its length except that they can't learn the actual contents of the files, except that if the file happens to be a file whose contents they already know then they can. Make sense? I'll come back later.