SBIR Phase I: Subspace: A Decentralized Database of End-User Devices

这个小型企业创新研究(SBIR)项目的更广泛的市场影响/商业潜力是促进去中心化数据库解决方案的主流使用，取代由亚马逊、谷歌和Facebook等公司提供的中央拥有和运营的数据中心和云服务。涉及数千万或数亿客户的数据安全漏洞现在司空见惯，与客户提供的数据的可疑使用有关的高调新闻报道也是如此。这个SBIR第一阶段项目提出解决关键问题，即开发一种新的网络协议，允许低延迟、安全、持久和高可用的、可在互联网规模运行的分散的No-SQL数据库。主要目标包括：开发一种新型的P2P覆盖网络，该网络结合了零跳分布式哈希表(DHT)作为基础路由层和任意数量的传统Kademlia分布式哈希表作为特定应用的叶网络，所有这些都可以通过各种传输协议进行通信；构建新的空间证明以用作空间证明区块链的协议层和存储节点的能力证明；利用基于可验证延迟函数的复制证明来创建安全的分散存储网络；以及跨公共主机设备和客户端运行时实施和测试该协议。该项目的最终目标是验证子空间协议的技术可行性、可扩展性和市场兴趣。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader market impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project is to foster the mainstream use of decentralized database solutions in place of centrally owned and operated data centers and cloud services offered by companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook. Data security breaches involving tens or hundreds of millions of customers are now commonplace, as are high-profile news stories related to questionable uses of customer-supplied data.This SBIR Phase I project proposes to solve the key problem of developing a new network protocol that allows for a low-latency, secure, persistent and highly-available, decentralized No-SQL database which may operate at Internet scale. Key objectives include: development of a novel P2P overlay network which combines a zero-hop Distributed Hash Table (DHT) as a base routing layer and any number of traditional Kademlia DHTs as application specific leaf networks, all of which may communicate through a variety of transport protocols; constructing a new proof-of-space for use both as the consensus layer of a proof-of-space blockchain and as a proof-of-capacity for storage nodes; creating a secure Decentralized Storage Network utilizing a proof of replication based on verifiable delay functions; and implementing and testing the protocol across common host devices and client runtimes. The end goal of the project is to validate the technical feasibility, scalability, and market interest for the subspace protocol.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.