DISTARNET – A Distributed Archival Network

Abstract

The goal of this work is to develop and establish an archival system for digital data with focus on long-term archival as required by archives and museums which preserve the audio-visual heritage of our time. The fundamental idea is that institutions with long-term archival needs of digital data collaborate in order to build a geographically distributed, Internet based archival system. It has been of primary concern in designing this system to minimizing the risk of data loss due to a catastrophic event (on a local or even regional scale such as a devastating earthquake) or false manipulation. In addition the archival network has to cope with the rapidly changing standards of information technology and preserve readability of the data beyond changes of software and hardware technology.The archival network will be implemented as a distributed, self-organizing and optimized peer-to-peer (P2P) network with a high redundancy. The data to be archived will be distributed in redundant copies among all participants' parties. It will be assumed that the data will be transported over untrusted channels and stored on untrusted nodes. Therefore, strong cryptography will be used to guarantee the integrity and privacy of the archived digital assets.The goal of this work is to establish an archival system for digital data with focus on long-term archival as required by archives and museums which preserve the audio-visual heritage of our time. The fundamental idea is that institutions with long-term archival needs of digital data (digitized cultural assets such as photographic collections, sound archives etc.) collaborate in order to build a geographically distributed, redundant Internet based archival system. Minimizing the risk of data loss due to a catastrophic event (on a local or even regional scale such as a devastating earthquake) or false manipulation is of primary concern in designing this system. Additionally the archival network has to cope with the rapidly changing standards of information technology and preserve readability of the data beyond changes of software and hardware technology.In order to achieve both goals, we propose a globally distributed storage network with high redundancy based on a peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture. The integrity and privacy of the data entrusted to the archival system is guaranteed by strong cryptography, especially private/public key encryption schemes. The archival network forms sort of a “closed user group” based on Internet technology where all relevant data is encrypted.