Truffles — a Secure Service for Widespread File Sharing

Truffles is a system meant to address some of the major issues that still make it difficult to share files between users at different sites. In particular, it addresses the problems associated with secure file sharing, and the problems of high administrative overhead. Truffles will combine facilities of the Ficus file system and TIS/PEM, a privacy enhanced mail system, to make file sharing considerably easier. Truffles must deal with several important security problems, including secure transport of data, authentication of the users sharing files, handling of different administrative domains, and permitting system administrators to control, flexibly, yet easily, what sorts of sharing are done. This paper describes these problems and the solutions Truffles will use.