CapFS: A new perspective on GDP filesystems

The Global Data Plane (GDP) is a data-centric narrow-waist infrastructure that transports ​cryptographically hardened bundles of data, called DataCapsules. The nature of DataCapsules as secure single-writer append-only logs makes it an ideal tool for data-storage. This motivates us to build a use case on top of DataCapsules utilizing its security, authenticity, and replication. Past work has done on demonstrating the concept of file system layering on GDP such as GDPFS (reference here). GDPFS with its tree-like index was designed to optimize random file access, but its thin-layered architecture on top of append-only logging infrastructure significantly limits multi-user capability. Recent research (reference) performed on file system access patterns indicated the rarity of random reads and writes, but GDPFS is not optimized for that workload. To handle these limitations, we proposed CapFS, an inode-indexed file system with multi-user support on top of GDP infrastructure.