Feature Requirements for Encrypted Preservation Storage
Tallman, Nathan
Good afternoon,
I’ve been following Small Data Industries’ (Ben Fino-Radin’s business) work on Starling since last fall. Starling, is pretty neat, it uses the Inter Planetary File System via way of FileCoin [i.e. blockchain], to provide cryptographically secure distributed file storage. There’s a lot more to it that gets too complicated to explain over email, but check out the website. I’m excited for all sorts of reasons but I think this is exactly the type of R&D work we need in our field.
Anyway, there have been a couple rounds of development on Starling so far, with funding from various sources. Ben is working with MetaArchive on an NEH grant to fund additional development and I’ve been helping to facilitate conversations. MetaArchive is more of a ready group of users for testing and user story development, not MetaArchive moving off LOCKSS onto Starling. (Yet, anyways 😉) In this next round they want to have multiple voices in the mix to try and make Starling a killer app for distributed storage.
As part of this next round, Small Data Industries is very interested in exploring organizational requirements for encryption. If you are encrypting content, both for local storage and content sent to distributed digital preservation services, Ben would like to speak with you. This will help SDI define the feature requirements for encryption in Starling. Please contact Ben directly at b...@smalldata.industries if you are interested in participating.
Happy Friday everyone.
Best health,
Nathan
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Nathan Tallman
Digital Preservation Librarian
Penn State University Libraries