Barnraising

Barnraising is a cooperative Web mirroring system consisting of a dynamic set of "volunteer" hosts. The idea is that anybody behind a cheap DSL line ought to be able to run his own Web server. Since a residential network connection is not likely to have enough upstream bandwidth to support a large client base, Barnraising allows volunteers who like the Web site to donate some of their bandwidth to it by becoming a mirror.

What makes this difficult is that without any security protocol, a rogue "volunteer" can lie to clients about what's on the site. To deal with this problem, Barnraising uses a new technique called "SSL splitting", which uses SSL to provide end-to-end data integrity between the clients and the server.

Publications