A Security Analysis of the Emerging P2P-Based Personal Cloud Platform MaidSafe

Abstract

The emergence of decentralized crypto currencies such as Bitcoin and the success of the anonymizing network TOR lead to an increased interest in peer-to-peer based technologies lately-not only due to the prevalent deployment of mass network surveillance technologies by authorities around the globe. While today's application services typically employ centralized client/server architectures that require the user to trust the service provider, new decentralized platforms that eliminate this need of trust are on their rise. In this paper we critically analyze a fully decentralized alternative to today's digital ecosystem-MaidSafe-that drops most of the commonly applied principles. The MaidSafe network implements a fully decentralized personal data storage platform on which user applications can be built. The network is made up by individual users who contribute storage, computing power and bandwidth. All communication between network nodes is encrypted, yet users only have to remember a username and password. To guarantee these objectives, MaidSafe combines mechanisms such as Self-Authentication, Self-Encryption, and a P2P-based public key infrastructure. This paper provides a condensed description of MaidSafe's key protocol mechanisms, derives the underlying identity and access management architecture, and evaluates it with respect to security and privacy aspects.

IPFS and Friends: A Qualitative Comparison of Next Generation Peer-to-Peer Data Networks

“…Paul et al [64] provide a first security analysis of SAFE in 2014, concerning confidentiality, integrity and availability as well as possible attacks. In 2015 Jacob et al [65] analyzed the security of the network with respect to authenticity, integrity, confidentiality, availability, and anonymity. The authors explained how the self-authentication and the decentralized nature could be potentially exploited to reveal personal data of single entities.…”

A Server-Based Distributed Storage Using Secret Sharing with AES-256 for Lightweight Safety Restoration

“…However, in that paper, how to restore the owner's data when the peer storages are disconnected is not considered. In papers [13], [14], to recover the disconnected data from the peer storages, the owner generates and stores the backup data for the peer storages. Therefore, each of the peer storages in the P2P helps each other to repair when one of the data in the P2P storage is broken.…”

“…As for the incentive, the proposed scheme can be applied to the commercial distributed storage services such as Maidsafe [13] and Storj [17]. The reason is that the peer, which just provides its storage without saving its data to other peers, exists in the proposed scheme.…”

“…The peer can expect the incentive. According to [13], [17], the peer can get money from the operator while providing its storage for the commercial distributed storage service. As for the payment, the owner does not pay anything to use in the proposed scheme.…”

“…As for the payment, the owner does not pay anything to use in the proposed scheme. However, in the commercial distributed storage service [13], [17], the owner pays to the operator for using storage service. Therefore, if the proposed scheme is used for commercial service, the owner needs to pay to use the storage service.…”