News

Publication
Sep 26, 2005

Securing Resources in Collaborative Environments: A Peer-to-peer Approach.
K. Berket, A.Essiari and M. R. Thompson, To appear in Proceedings of the 17th IASTED International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing and Systems, Phoenix, AZ, Nov. 14-16, 2005. LBNL-58867.

Progress Report
May 19, 2005

January 2005 - March 2005

Software Release
May 12, 2005

Scishare 0.9.3.2

Presentation
Feb 17, 2005

Scishare: A Secure P2P Information Sharing Tool
Presented by K. Berket at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), Feb. 17, 2005. (pdf)

Mailing List
Sep 21, 2004

scishare-users mailing list created

---

Motivation

Groups collaborating on scientific experiments have a need to share information and data among the collaborators. This information and data is often represented in the form of files and database entries. In a typical scientific collaboration, there are many different locations where data would naturally be stored. Experiment data is usually stored in a repository at or near the instrument and individual investigators access it by copying files from that repository. Simulation and analysis data derived from this work is usually stored where the analysis or simulation occurred. Presentations describing the results of the experiments and analyses are stored on the laptops of the presenting scientists. These storage locations are usually determined by factors like where the data is generated, who generated the data, where it is maintained, where it is analyzed, and/or the amount of storage space available at a location. These factors are different for each piece of data and often result in the data files being stored in a wide variety of locations making it difficult for collaborators to find what they need.

Overview

This project will develop a lightweight, scalable, and secure file-sharing system that will enable scientists to store and manage their files on local storage facilities while sharing them with remote participants. A core component of this system will be the security mechanisms to allow individual and group-based authorization. The underlying infrastructure that will enable this is the secure and reliable group communication system, which is providing the communication mechanism. The group communication system will also provide a natural mechanism for scalability of the system. The product of this research and development project will be a scalable and secure peer-to-peer file-sharing system that leverages off of the capabilities of a group communication system and X.509 identity certificate based authentication and authorization. This new file-sharing system will combine many of the best features of systems like Gnutella, Groove and Napster while avoiding most of their limitations and inefficiencies.

Contact: Webmaster <webmaster@george.lbl.gov>
Credits: A Scalable and Secure Peer-to-Peer Information Sharing Tool research and development is funded by the U.S. Dept. of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, Mathematical, Information, and Computational Sciences Division; Support Credits identify the funding sources and the organizational context of the work described in this document.