Escaping the evils of centralized control with self-certifying pathnames

Abstract

People have long trusted central authorities to coordinate secure collaboration on local-area networks. Unfortunately, the Internet doesn’t provide the kind of administrative structures individual organizations do. As such, users risk painful consequen ces if global, distributed systems rely on central authorities for security. Fortunately, securit y need not come at the price of centralized control. To prove it, we present SFS, a secure, global, decen tralized file system permitting easy cross-administrative realm collaboration. With a simple i d a, self-certifying pathnames, SFS lets users escape the evils of centralized control.