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Scishare is a lightweight, scalable, and secure file-sharing system that
leverages the capabilities of a group communication system and X.509 identity
certificate based authentication
and authorization. It provides for secure
sharing of information, allowing users to
protect their data through individual and group-based authorization mechanisms.
Scishare also allows users to share public information within our system
without compromising the security goals. This is similar to web servers, which
offer up public data, but can also sandbox data such that it can be accessed
only by authorized users. The group communication system provides a natural
mechanism for scalability of the system. Scishare allows parallel download of
files from multiple sites.
The default query service for the scishare application is based on the InterGroup protocols. The InterGroup protocols are a group communication system that allows us to reliably deliver each query to all of the current participants in a scalable manner. The default query response service is based on TLS. Thus, queries are multicast to the entire group of participants and responses are delivered directly to the requestor.