Our CTO, Paul Carpentier invented and patented the concepts that define CAS (Content Addressed Storage). These patents, together with FilePool, the company he co-founded, were purchased by EMC in 2001. Part of the initial CAS concept involved running a hashing algorithm over an object and using the resulting hash as the unique fingerprint/identifier for that object. This technique offers a natural method to guarantee that the content was never changed, since re-running the same hashing algorithm should yield the same hash fingerprint if the content were untouched. Unfortunately that approach only remains valid as long as the hashing algorithms being used are beyond suspicion, i.e. no one can "reverse-engineer" different content having the same fingerprint.
In 2005, the MD5 hashing technique employed by many CAS vendors was successfully attacked by Chinese academic cryptographers; thereby starting the decay of integrity guarantees on petabytes of information secured using these algorithms.
It is a fact of life and mathematics that hashing algorithms naturally go stale as computing power increases and cryptographers engage that compute power to successfully attack yet another hash.
It became clear that the CAS market was in dire need of a method to transparently upgrade the hashing algorithms without needing to unload and reload the data or modifying applications.
Caringo has invented a breakthrough process (patent pending) for transparent and uncompromising field upgrading of the hashing algorithm used in CAStor, effectively scaling the strength against readily available computer power. The result is that your hash never will go stale. Caringo's Content Integrity Seal provides the first industry example of guaranteed data integrity that can literally last the lifetime of your information.
Caringo provides varying levels of information integrity based on your application, regulatory and compliance needs. For compliance and regulatory applications, our patent pending integrity seals are externalized and logged so that their validity can be confirmed in court by independent experts, without ever referencing any Caringo software in the process.
|
|
email us © Copyright 2008 Caringo, Inc. All rights reserved.
