POST: A Secure, Resilient, Cooperative Messaging System
Résumé
POST is a decentralized messaging infrastructure that supports a wide range of collaborative applications, including electronic mail, instant messaging, chat, news, shared calendars and whiteboards. POST is highly resilient, secure, scalable and does not rely on dedicated servers. Instead, POST is built upon a peer-to-peer (p2p) overlay network, consisting of participants' desktop computers. POST offers three simple and general services: (i) secure, single-copy message storage, (ii) metadata based on single-writer logs, and (iii) event notification. We sketch POST's basic messaging infrastructure and show how POST can be used to construct a co-operative, secure email service called ePOST.