Securely sharing and managing personal content is a challenging task in multi-device environments. In this paper, we design and implement a new platform called personal content networking (PCN). Our work is inspired by content-centric networking (CCN) because we aim to enable access to personal content using its name instead of its location. The unique challenge of PCN is to support secure file operations such as replication, updates, and access control over distributed untrusted devices. The primary contribution of this work is the design and implementation of a secure content management platform that supports secure updates, replications, and fine-grained content-centric access control of files. Furthermore, we demonstrate its feasibility through a prototype implementation on the CCNx skeleton.
This paper sketches the design of PAST, a large-scale, Internet-based, global storage utility that provides scalability, high availability, persistence and security. PAST is a peer-to-peer Internet application and is entirely self-organizing. PAST nodes serve as access points for clients, participate in the routing of client requests, and contribute storage to the system. Nodes are not trusted, they may join the system at any time and may silently leave the system without warning. Yet, the system is able to provide strong assurances, efficient storage access, load balancing and scalability. Among the most interesting aspects of PAST's design are (1) the Pastry location and routing scheme, which reliably and efficiently routes client requests among the PAST nodes, has good network locality properties and automatically resolves node failures and node additions; (2) the use of randomization to ensure diversity in the set of nodes that store a file's replicas and to provide load balancing; and (3) the optional use of smartcards, which are held by each PAST user and issued by a third party called a broker The smartcards support a quota system that balances supply and demand of storage in the system. Trends in conventional storage infrastructure motivate the development of foundational technologies for building a wide-area read-write storage repository capable of providing a single image of a distributed storage resource The overarching design goals of such an infrastructure include client performance, global resource utilization, system scalability (providing a single logical view of larger resource and user pools) and application scalability (enabling single applications with large resource requirements) Such a storage infrastructure forms the basis for second generation data-grid efforts underlying massive data handling in high-energy physics, nanosciences, and bioinformatics, among others. This paper describes some of the foundational technologies underlying such a repository, Plethora, for semi-static peer-to-peer (P2P) networks implemented on a wide-area Internet testbed In contrast to many current efforts that focus entirely on unstructured dynamic P2P environments, Plethora focuses on semi-static peers with strong network connectivity and a partially persistent network state In a semi-static P2P network, peers are likely to remain participants in the network over long periods of time (e.g., compute servers), and are capable of providing reasonably high availability and response-time guarantees The repository integrates novel concepts in locality enhancing overlay networks, transactional semantics for read-write data coupled with hierarchical versioning, and novel erasure codes for robustness While mentioning approaches taken by Plethora to other problems, this paper focuses on the problem of routing data request to blocks, while integrating caching and locality enhancing overlays into a single framework We show significant performance improvements resulting from our routing techniques.