DISTRESS: DISTRibutEd Secure file System

For our graduate project in Secure Data Management at the Rochester Institute of Technology, we proposed a possible design for a secure collaborative file storage system. Our system uses strict client side encryption and a receipt based authentication system. This lets DISTRESS lend itself to a diverse range of applications built on top of it, such as: an anonymous dead-drop tool like the New Yorker's StrongBox or a friend-to-friend backup service like CrashPlan.

Requirements

Right now we have a limited set of requirements on purpose:

• Erlang VM (version R15B01 or higher if you are building a release)
• GNUMake or CMake

However DISTRESS is headless and will need a client to connect with it. We have a python client tested on python 2.7.3.

Building

Just run make as long as Erlang is on the path it should work. To run the DISTRESS server without having to build a release, type the following:

• ./distressd

This is helpful for debugging the distress system before building the release for installation.

NOTE: if you are running an older version of Erlang, then there may be errors, you can run make oldcompile in the server directory. This means you will be unable to build a release, but you should still be able to test it out.

Testing-out DISTRESS

After building and running the server as mentioned above, you can then use the client to connect to it by running:

• cd cli
• and then ./distress -h to see the help menu.

The DISTRESS client works like git, in that it has a bunch of subcommands each with their own options and parameters. Try adding a file:

• ./distress add ../README.md

And then pulling it out again:

• ./distress get 1

Note that we used the file ID of the file, which can be found:

• ./distress list --verbose

We can then verify our file by either doing a diff or checking it against the receipt:

• diff README.md ../README.md
• ./distress verify 1 README.md

Installing

Note that this is not a necessary step if you just wish to mess around with the DISTRESS system. But deploying DISTRESS is simple. Running make release will generate a rel directory which will contain everything you need to run DISTRESS, including a stripped down version of the Erlang VM. You can now zip/tar it up to distribute, however just linking to the binary should be enough to run on the current platform:

make release
ln -s $(pwd)/rel/distress/bin/distress ~/bin/distress

Running the release is similar to a standard init.d service (with some added features:

~/bin/distress
Usage: distress {start|stop|restart|reboot|ping|console|attach}

Once started you can attach to the running service and treat it like an Erlang shell to send commands to it.

Contributing

We welcome issue and bug reports, code patches, and documentation improvements.