Spores is a push and pull peer-to-peer method of file sharing and storage, making use of publicly available space on the network. A user stores a file by pushing it to a set of peers. The file then becomes visible and available to peers that search for it. Spores allows the exchange of folders as well as individual files. To ensure a file operation references a specific file or folder by content, an MD5 uniqueness code can be used to specify the search or download. If both code and file name are given, the target must match both. An analysis of the storage and retrieval performance is presented.
Thomas E. Portegys