Confidential and Resilient Store of Persistent Web Objects

by Mohan, Anoop

Persistent and secure store for web objects is an attractive feature in todays web world and possess a good potential for exploration. Persistence of a storage mechanism refers to its ability to store an object for extremely long time periods. Resilience refers to its fault tolerance ability or its ability to retrieve the object completely even if a part of that object is lost due to any catastrophic failures like disk failure. It is also important that this storage mechanism is able to store this object in a secure manner. In the current world, usability of any storage mechanism is enhanced multiple times if it could be used from a web interface. This thesis considers different techniques that provide these properties and proposes a storage mechanism that makes use of information dispersal techniques that is suited to store data securely, with an emphasis on availability and resilience. A working prototype of this storage mechanism was developed as a part of this thesis and is made available as a library for program developers. This library provides APIs to store and retrieve data as well as a daemon for error control. The APIs to store and retrieve data also accepts HTTP requests, which increase its usability to web developers. The performance of this prototype was measured and is presented using graphs. Finally a demonstration of the applications of this prototype is also provided.