Fileteller: Paying and Getting Paid for File Storage

Abstract

Abstract. FILETELLER is a credential-based network file storage system with provisions for paying for file storage and getting paid when others access files. Users get access to arbitrary amounts of storage anywhere in the network, and use a micropayments system to pay for both the initial creation of the file and any subsequent accesses. Widescale information sharing requires that a number of issues be addressed; these include distributed access, access control, payment, accounting, and delegation (so that information owners may allow others to access their stored content). In this paper we demonstrate how all these issues are addressed using a micropayment architecture based on a trust-management system. Utilizing the same mechanism for both access control and payment results in an elegant and scalable architecture.

TAPI: Transactions for Accessing Public Infrastructure

“…The billing provider cannot customize the risk-management parameters per-customer or per-merchant. Fileteller [7] uses a scheme similar to ours for buying and selling network-based storage.…”

“…Similarly, if the merchant produces H n−1 , the client cannot claim that she has not sent it. An extensive discussion of the security of the KeyNote microcheck architecture may be found in [7]. A key observation is that the low value of the checks and the need for light-weight verification mechanisms favor the use of credential expiration (with short lifetimes) over the use of a more heavyweight revocation mechanism such as credential revocation lists.…”

A market-based bandwidth charging framework

“…Similar to previous work on credential-based micropayments [10,24], our system has three types of communication: provisioning, reconciliation, and transaction. Although delegation of credentials (and thus access rights to reserved bandwidth) is possible, we do not consider it in this paper.…”

Efficiency and nash equilibria in a scrip system for P2P networks

“…Simple economic systems based on a scrip or money seem to avoid many of these problems, are easy to implement, and are quite popular (see, e.g., [15,18,31]). However, they have a different set of problems.…”