The Free Haven Project was formed in 1999 by a group of

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

students with the aim to develop a secure, decentralized system of data storage. The group's work led to a collaboration with the

United States Naval Research Laboratory The United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) is the corporate research laboratory for the United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps. Located in Washington, DC, it was founded in 1923 and conducts basic scientific research, appl ...

to develop

Tor Tor, TOR or ToR may refer to: Places * Toronto, Canada ** Toronto Raptors * Tor, Pallars, a village in Spain * Tor, former name of Sloviansk, Ukraine, a city * Mount Tor, Tasmania, Australia, an extinct volcano * Tor Bay, Devon, England * Tor ...

, funded by

DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adva ...

Distributed anonymous storage system

The Project's early work focused on an anonymous storage system, Free Haven, which was designed to ensure the privacy and security of both readers and publishers. It contrasts Free Haven to anonymous publishing services to emphasize persistence rather than accessibility. Free Haven is a distributed peer-to-peer system designed to create a "servnet" consisting of "servnet nodes" which each hold fragments ("shares") of documents, divided using Rabin's Information dispersal algorithm such that the publisher or file contents cannot be determined by any one piece. The shares are stored on the servnet along with a unique

public key Public-key cryptography, or asymmetric cryptography, is the field of cryptographic systems that use pairs of related keys. Each key pair consists of a public key and a corresponding private key. Key pairs are generated with cryptographic alg ...

. To recover and recreate the file, a client broadcasts the public key to find fragments, which are sent to the client along anonymous routes. For greater security, Free Haven periodically moves the location of shares between nodes. Its function is similar to

Freenet Hyphanet (until mid-2023: Freenet) is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant, Anonymity application, anonymous communication. It uses a decentralized distributed data store to keep and deliver information, and has a suite of free soft ...

but with greater focus on persistence to ensure unpopular files do not disappear. The mechanisms that enable this persistence, however, are also the cause of some problems with inefficiency. A referral- or recommendation-based "metatrust"

reputation system A reputation system is a program or algorithm that allow users of an online community to rate each other in order to build trust (social sciences), trust through reputation. Some common uses of these systems can be found on E-commerce websites s ...

built into the servnet attempts to ensure reciprocity and information value by holding node operators accountable. Although nodes remain pseudonymous, communication is facilitated between operators through anonymous email.

Work with Tor

Tor was developed by the US Naval Research Laboratory and the Free Haven Project to secure government communications, with initial funding from the US

Office of Naval Research The Office of Naval Research (ONR) is an organization within the United States Department of the Navy responsible for the science and technology programs of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. Established by Congress in 1946, its mission is to plan ...

and DARPA. Tor was deployed in 2003, as their third generation of deployed

onion routing Onion routing is a technique for anonymous communication over a computer network. In an onion network, messages are encapsulated in layers of encryption, analogous to the layers of an onion. The encrypted data is transmitted through a series o ...

designs. In 2005, the

Electronic Frontier Foundation The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an American international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 1990 to promote Internet civil liberties. It provides funds for legal defense in court, ...

provided additional funding to the Free Haven Project. In 2006, the Tor Project was incorporated as a non-profit organization.

References

External links

The Free Haven Project website
{{Tor hidden services Anonymity networks Cloud storage Computer security organizations Internet privacy organizations Tor (anonymity network) Tor onion services Science and technology in Massachusetts