STORJ WHITE PAPER DETAILS/SUMMARY

STORJ WHITE PAPER DETAILS/SUMMARY
Storj (pronounced storage) is a platform of decentralized apps that enables you store data in a decentralized way. It encrypts your files, shreds them into shards (a portion of an encrypted file to be stored on the network) the shredded files are then stored in a decentralized network of computers around the world. It leaves you with a complete copy of your file that no one has, not even an encrypted form.
The core objective is to decentralize third party data storage model by removing overhead cost of data farms and in its place give incentives to people with additional hard drive space to offer to the network zed space. This approach stops third party service from becoming owners of your data, it decreases the cost involved in storing data, and strengthen data to combat censorship and data failures through client-side encryption.
A peer-to-peer cloud storage network using client-side encryption enables users to transfer and share data without relying on a third party storage provider. The removal of central controls would check most traditional data failures and also increase security, privacy, and data control. Peer-to-peer networks are usually unattainable for production storage systems, as data availability is a function of popularity, and not utility.
Traditional cloud storage platforms are not as fast, cheap and reliable as Storj. Because with Srorj, multiple machines are serving your files simultaneously and this makes it faster. It is cheaper in the sense that instead of paying for a built data center, you are renting spare hard drive space.
Storj is able to create a community of users (farmers) with the help of blockchain technology. Data uploaded to the network by users is broken up into equal chunks and encrypted. Distribution of these data (shards), occur across farming nodes in the data owner’s network. Pointers to where the shards are located on Ethereum’s merkel tree are stored on Storj’s off-chain server. When data owners retrieve their files, they start a process that scans the merkel tree for the shards, verifies the identity of the owners, de-crypts and re-assembles them, then delivers restored files back to the owners. The server that contains the location of the shards on the blockchain is centralized. Hence, more vulnerable to attack than when the information was stored in a decentralized manner. Even though a malicious threat could likely find where the data shards are located, they will not be able to de-crypt them without the private key of the owner. Part of Storj’s plan for the future involves coming up with a decentralized solution that will enable them store location of shard data on the blockchain itself.
There are several benefits involved with this decentralized model that could likely give it a fighting advantage over traditional cloud storage models.
Low overhead and maintenance cost is the resulting case scenario because Storj doesn’t need to build or maintain data centers, which in turn minimizes operating costs allowing Storj to price their service in a competitive way. And centralized cloud storage models have to put to account hardware redundancy requirements. Originally, files in one data center have to be replicated in the other. Storj can provide the same protection level by imitating shards and then storing them on different nodes within the existing cloud network.
Data stored on a centralized server is susceptible to misuse by malicious actors inside and attacks by malicious actors outside. Nodes only have access to encrypted data shards on their own hardware on the Storj network. Increase in network size makes it almost impossible to find out where other shards of the same file are located on the network. So, it is highly unlikely that a malicious model would have the ability to create a readable file from encrypted shards scattered across the network.
THE STORJ CONSENSUS PROTOCOL
It allows people on the network negotiate contracts involved, transfer or retrieve data, and check the presence and reliability of remote data. Some qualities of zed protocol include:
Storj is built on a DHT (distributed hash table) called Kademlia which creates a distributed network with message routing and other needed qualities.
Security exponential scales with the network’s linear growth.
Storj is payment agnostic.
Through a challenge-response relationship, Storj makes available a standard format for giving out and verifying proofs of retrieveability. This interaction is called an audit.
Negotiation of contracts, issuing and verifying audits, providing payments, managing file encryption keys, pre-processing shards etc are the responsibility of data owners. In fact, data owners are responsible for everything.
Storj uses a local file called KFS to facilitate on-disk storage for farmers. KFS seeks to solve scaling problems.
LIKELY SUSCEPTIBILITIES
Due to a potentially volatile nature of networks consistency, clients have to implement data redundancy schemes. This process creates a learning curve where clients can lose data more easily.
Consistency and future scalability is the issue with farmer node storage network. This doesn’t mean that the network is not economically scalable, but because of increased electricity costs, there will soon be a time where there will not be profitability of being a storage node.
Identity hijacking is possible on Kademlia. Attacks like the Google attack, the Honest Geppetto attack and the Eclipse attack, attempt isolating the nodes in the network graph by making sure all outward connections reah malicious nodes.
DRIVE FARMING
Drive Farming is the term used to define the renting out extra hard drive space. You can use the hard drive space to farm STORJ, the same way you can use the GPU of your computer to mine Ethereum. Users specify a folder on their drive to store network data and allocate available hard drive space. Small encrypted shards of Storj users’ files are stored in this space. This implies that no farmer holds the whole file uploaded by a user. No chance that the farmer could read it anyway because the file is encrypted.