Towards an archival Intermemory

We propose a self-organizing archival Intermemory. That is, a noncommercial subscriber-provided distributed information storage service built on the existing Internet. Given an assumption of continued growth in the memory's total size, a subscriber's participation for only a finite time can nevertheless ensure archival preservation of the subscriber's data. Information disperses through the network over time and memories become more difficult to erase as they age. The probability of losing an old memory given random node failures is vanishingly small-and an adversary would have to corrupt hundreds of thousands of nodes to destroy a very old memory. This paper presents a framework for the design of an Intermemory, and considers certain aspects of the design in greater detail. In particular, the aspects of addressing, space efficiency, and redundant coding are discussed.