Good news everyone !

I am writing this message to announce that we have made the first public very-beta release of our project called Tamias (a private&secure storage), which is based on Tahoe-LAFS. This is sent primarily to the developer community of Tahoe because it is not going to be an easy to use thing before long and we do not have lots of resources here to dedicate to support.

The rest is mostly about history of the project, so you can skip to the end if you just want the URLs.

So, this project started from a suggestion by Randy (Bush), that he received himself by Steve (Bellovin), who learned about Tahoe somewhere. Some people might have noticed a poster we brought to Usenix FAST in February this year, or heard about the project at various gatherings.

Our goal was to build a distributed storage that would have a very fine-grained control over sharing, and allow people to build their own storage network by putting disk space together. After learning about Tahoe, we came to the conclusion that it was a very sound piece of work and that it had some properties exactly similar to what we were pursuing.

The goal was then to build on top of Tahoe something that is both user friendly and allows to manage capabilities. By 'manage capabilities' we mean a way to store them in a single place much like you can use an alias in the Tahoe CLI. But we also mean being able to scope these things to a single destination, and then to allow delegation.

In the end, we decided to introduce some kind of identity support by associating users with (at least one) pair of private/public keys. These keys allow to construct the URI of the Tamias 'root' folder where everything is stored. We also added some protection mechanism to prevent unauthorized people from hijacking 'secured' capabilities by having the remote server refuse to serve the blocks.

It was a sort of big hack on Tahoe 1.8.0 for a long time, until we got to the point where it doesn't look so bad that people can see it. We also synchronized with Tahoe 1.9.0 (thanks to Brian for the git bridge btw) and here we are.

You can read more stuff about it on the Tamias website here: https://tamias.iijlab.net/?p=43

We do know that the tarball is a mess (there are so many hacks here and there), especially the way we 'package' pycryptopp, but I would be happy to contribute the changes in the near future. They only involve being able to create an encrypting key and a decrypting key (from public and private key respectively) so it should be no big deal.

Happy end of year,
Jean
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