August 28th, 2013 
Brian Krent
On Wednesday, August 28, the Solid State Depot had crypto and meshnet meetup with lightning talks, general discussion, and installation for Bitmessage and Tahoe-LAFS.
Ben Burdette started off the meetup with a presentation on Bitmessage. Bitmessage is a P2P communicationns protocol used to send encrypted messages to another person or to many subscribers. It is decentralized and trustless, meaning that you need-not inherently trust any entities like root certificate authorities. It uses strong authentication which means that the sender of a message cannot be spoofed, and it aims to hide “non-content” data, like the sender and receiver of messages, from passive eavesdroppers like those running warrantless wiretapping programs.
Zooko talked about Tahoe-LAFS. Tahoe-LAFS is a free and open cloud storage system. It distributes your data across multiple servers. Even if some of the servers fail or are taken over by an attacker, the entire filesystem continues to function correctly, preserving your privacy and security.
Aspects of Tahoe-LAFS of interest at this meetup:
- LAFS cryptography: Public/private keypairs are per-file, not per-user, digital signatures are everywhere, public-key encryption is not used, secure hashes and merkle trees are a beautiful data structure, akin to git.
- The open source project: We have dozens of hackers from around the globe extending LAFS in different ways ; Want to contribute? We use a development process with complete unit test coverage and mandatory code review on all patches. We are nice. We have weekly meetings. Join in!
- Usage: How to get the source, build it, deploy a grid of storage servers, share files and directories with your friends; who runs storage servers and gives you access to their storage server—friends sharing storage space with each other? Strangers meeting in the darknets? You can lease storage from my for-profit startup.
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