August 4, 2009, 6:15 am
Tahoe is a secure distributed filesystem that is designed to conform with the principle of least authority. The developers behind the project announced this month the release of version 1.5, which includes bugfixes and improvements to portability and performance, including a 10 percent boost to file upload speed over high-latency connections.
Tahoe’s underlying architecture is similar to that of a peer-to-peer network. Files are distributed across multiple nodes in a manner that allows data integrity to be maintained in the event that individual nodes are compromised or fail. It uses AES encryption to protect file contents from tampering and scrutiny. Tahoe can be used to establish a relatively fault-tolerant storage pool that spans a number of conventional computers over a local network or the Internet. This approach to cloud storage might be more appropriately described as “crowd” storage.
