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

该小企业创新研究 (SBIR) 项目更广泛的市场影响/商业潜力是促进去中心化数据库解决方案的主流使用，以取代亚马逊、谷歌和 Facebook 等公司提供的集中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已经司空见惯，与客户提供的数据的可疑使用相关的备受瞩目的新闻报道也是如此。SBIR 第一阶段项目旨在解决开发新网络协议的关键问题，该协议允许低延迟、安全、持久和高可用、去中心化的 No-SQL 数据库，可以在互联网规模上运行。主要目标包括：开发一种新颖的 P2P 覆盖网络，该网络结合了作为基础路由层的零跳分布式哈希表 (DHT) 和作为应用特定叶网络的任意数量的传统 Kademlia DHT，所有这些都可以通过各种传输协议进行通信；构建一个新的空间证明，既用作空间证明区块链的共识层，又用作存储节点的容量证明；利用基于可验证延迟函数的复制证明创建安全的去中心化存储网络；跨常见主机设备和客户端运行时实现和测试协议。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点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.