The LOCKSS project has developed and deployed in a worldwide test a peer-to-peer system for preserving access to journals and other archival information published on the Web. It consists of a large number of independent, low-cost, persistent web caches that cooperate to detect and repair damage to their content by voting in “opinion polls.” Based on this experience, we present a design for and simulations of a novel protocol for voting in systems of this kind. It incorporates rate limitation and intrusion detection to ensure that even some very powerful adversaries attacking over many years have only a small probability of causing irrecoverable damage before being detected. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3.7 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Digital Libraries; D.4.5 [Operating Systems]: Reliability General Terms Design, Economics, Reliability Keywords Replicated storage, rate limiting, digital preservation.
Petros Maniatis, David S. H. Rosenthal, Mema Rouss