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Re: Encoding for Robust Immutable Storage (ERIS)


From: pukkamustard
Subject: Re: Encoding for Robust Immutable Storage (ERIS)
Date: Sun, 26 Jul 2020 19:28:49 +0200
User-agent: mu4e 1.4.10; emacs 26.3


Hello Christian,

Thank you for your comments!

For my taste, the block size is much too small. I understand 4k can make sense for page tables and SATA, but looking at benchmarks 4k is still too small to maximize SATA throughput. I would also worry about 4k for a request size in any database or network protocol. The overheads per request are still too big for modern hardware. You could easily go to 8k, which could be justified with 9k jumbo frames for Ethernet and would at least also utilitze all of the bits in your paths. The 32k of ECRS are close to the 64k which are reportedly the optimum for modern M.2
media. IIRC Torrents even use 256k.

I agree that increasing block size makes sense for improving performance
in storage and transport.

The overhead from padding may be
large for very small files if you go beyond 4k, but you should also think in terms of absolute overhead: even a 3100% overhead doesn't change the fact that the absolute overhead is tiny for a 1k file.

The use-case I have in mind for ERIS is very small pieces of data (not
even small files). Examples include ActivityStreams objects or
OpenStreetMaps nodes.

Apparently the average size of individual ActivityStreams objects is less than 1kB (unfortunately I don't have the data to back this up).

I agree that the overhead of 3100% for a single 1kB object is
acceptable. But I would argue that an overhead of 3100% for very many 1kB objects is not. The difference might be a 32 GB database instead of
a 1 GB database.

Furthermore, you should consider a trick we use in GNUnet-FS, which is that we share *directories*, and for small files, we simply _inline_ the full file data in the meta data of the file that is stored with the directory or search result. So you can basically avoid having to ever download tiny files as separate entities, so for files <32k we have zero
overhead this way.

That makes a lot of sense.

But packing multiple objects into a single transport packet or grouping for storage on disk/in database works for small block sizes as well. The
optimization just happens at a "different layer".

The key value I see in having small block sizes is that tiny pieces of
data can be individually referenced and used (securely).

I'd be curious to see how much the two pass encoding costs in practice -- it might be less expensive than ECRS if you are lucky (hashing one big block being cheaper than many small hash operations), or much more expensive if you are unlucky (have to actually read the data twice from disk). I am not sure that it is worth it merely to reduce the number of hashes/keys in the non-data blocks. Would be good to have some data on this, for various file sizes and platforms (to judge IO/RAM caching effects). As I said, I can't tell for sure if the 2nd pass is virtually free or quite expensive -- and that is an important detail. Especially with a larger block size, the overhead of an extra key in the non-data
blocks could be quite acceptable.

I think the cost of the two-pass encoding in ERIS is quite expensive. Considering that the hash of the individual blocks also needs to be computed (as reference in parent nodes), I think ECRS will always win
performance wise.

Maybe the answer is not ECRS or ERIS but ECRS and ERIS. ECRS for large pieces of data, where it makes more sense to have large block size and single-pass encoding. And ERIS for (very many) small pieces of data
where a 3100% overhead is too much but the performance penalty is
acceptable and size of data is much smaller than memory.

There might be some heuristic that says: If data is larger than 2MB use
ECRS, else use ERIS and you get the verification capability.

If using ECRS, you can add the verification capability by encoding a list of all the hash references to the ECRS block with ERIS. The ERIS
read capability of this list of ECRS block is enough to verify the
integrity of the original ECRS encoded content (without revealing the
content).

What do you think?

For 3.4 Namespaces, I would urge you to look at the GNU Name System (GNS). My plan is to (eventually, when I have way too much time and could actually re-do FS...) replace SBLOCKS and KBLOCKS of ECRS with
basically only GNS.

I have been looking into it. It does seem to be a perfect application of
GNS.

The crypto is way above my head and using readily available and already implemented primitives would make implementation much easier for me. But I understand the need for "non-standard" crypto and am following the
ongoing discussions.

-pukkamustard


On 7/10/20 8:59 AM, pukkamustard wrote:

Hello GNUNet,

I'd like to request feedback, questions and comments on an encoding of content very much inspired by ECRS that I have been working on: Encoding
for Robust Immutable Storage (ERIS)

https://openengiadina.net/papers/eris.html

The motivation is to use the encoding in a social network like settings where short messages and interactions are encoded using ERIS (as RDF
[1]).

There is one major difference to ECRS (and a couple smaller ones) that I
would like to highlight:


** Verification capability

ERIS adds a verification capability. Holders of the verification capability can enumerate all blocks required to decode the content and verify integrity of the blocks without being able to decode the content.

This enables peers to cache the entire content without being able to
read the content.

The verification capability is enabled by using two keys:

1. A read key to encode the blocks holding content.
2. A verification key (which is deterministically derived from the read
  key) to encode the intermediary nodes of the Merkle tree.

This makes the scheme slightly more complicated than ECRS and also requires a two-pass encoding (when using convergent encryption).

Nevertheless I believe this is a very important feature that maybe results in a better privacy/complexity/availability trade-off as alluded
to in a previous thread
(https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnunet-developers/2020-05/msg00015.html).



** Block size

Block size is chosen to be 4kB. This an optimization towards small
content (short messages and social interactions).


** URN

Encoded content can be referred to by a URN making it usable from
existing Web (and RDF) settings. This could be added to ECRS.


** No namespacing / keyword search

There are currently no SBlock or KBlock like features. The idea is that these features can be built on-top of the base encoding (including
SBlock and KBlock).



We have a little JavaScript demo:
https://openengiadina.gitlab.io/js-eris/ . As well as implementation in
Guile [2].

I'd be very happy for your insight and feedback.

Thanks!

-pukkamustard


[1] https://openengiadina.net/papers/content-addressable-rdf.html
[2] https://gitlab.com/openengiadina/data-model/






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