The Phoenix Recovery System: Rebuilding from the Ashes of an Internet Catastrophe

The Internet today is highly vulnerable to Internet catastrophes: events in which an exceptionally successful Internet pathogen, like a worm or email virus, causes data loss on a significant percentage of the computers connected to the Internet. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of using data redundancy, a model of dependent host vulnerabilities, and distributed storage to tolerate such events. In particular, we motivate the design of a cooperative, distributed remote backup system called the Phoenix recovery system. The usage model of Phoenix is straightforward: a user specify an amount F of bytes from its disk space the system can use, and the goal of the system is to protect a proportional amount F/k of its data using storage provided by other hosts.