Distributed File System
-----------------------

In this directory you will find an implementation of DFS, a distributed file
system. In DFS, every file is splitted in blocks and saved in a distributed
hash table that is over a structured P2P network. Every block is encrypted
with AES in CBC mode, and every file is referenced with a encrypted
identifier. Each user of DFS have its own namespace.

Related work:
--------------
DFS shares the same ideas that CFS, but solves several security problems.
Besides, it is under a free GPL license, so anyone can download and modify to
fit their own purposes.

DFS is written with independent layers: the structured P2P overlay is Ring,
that consists in a simplified Chord. Besides, there are several
implementations of DHTs (local memory/persistent DHT, interface to OpenDHT
and DHT on our Ring) You can add any of these layers to your project for your
application, or even join to a Ring/DHT network with your own
application: you do not need to use DFS to join an existent Ring!

Security:
---------
The main difference between DFS and CFS is security. In the directory paper
there is a paper explaining in detail the modifications to cfs.

How to start:
-------------
Tests in the test/ directory and the dfsh.py script are good starting points.
In order to save a local file in a local DFS, use:

./dfsh.py configure 			# Just the first time!
./dfsh.py cp digital.jpg dfs:///digital.jpg

In order to get this file, do:

./dfsh.py cp dfs:///digital.jpg digital2.jpg

If you want to set up a Ring node or connect to an existing Ring network, you
may need to manually configure your file ~/.dfs/dfsrc. Unfortunately, at this
moment the source code is the main documentation source.

There must be a subversion repository with the last version of this package
somewhere, just let me set up a public one :)

Contact info:
-------------
The main developer of this package is Juan Vera del Campo, a PhD student at
Polytechnic University of Catalonia. My main research fields are resource
discovering, Peer-to-peer networks, mobile applications and applied security.
If you have something to say, please write to juanvi AT entel.upc.edu

(C) 2007, Juan Vera del Campo