industry
Astronomical research.
Use Cases
Backup and recovery storage of sensitive data.
challenge
Highly scalable data storage solution that provides:
- Data integrity
- Data security
- Data persistence
Solution
Store the institute’s data on Filecoin, the world’s largest decentralized storage network.
result
The institute is using Filecoin to store 60+ GiB of “extraterrestrial” data, including decoded ET transmissions.
Overview
Humanity has long been fascinated by the possibility of extraterrestrial life. With recent technological advances and the discovery of thousands of exoplanets, the search for life beyond Earth has become more realistic than ever. So... what would happen if we received a message from an alien civilization? The SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, artist Daniela de Paulis, an international team of experts, and Filecoin have collaborated to find out.
A Sign in Space is a revolutionary presentation of global drama that explores the process of decoding and interpreting extraterrestrial messages by engaging the global SETI community, professionals from different fields, and the wider public.
On May 24, 2023, the European Space Agency's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) in orbit around Mars sent a coded message to Earth to simulate receiving a signal from extraterrestrial intelligence.
Next, the encoded message was detected and processed by three world-class radio astronomy observatories: the SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array (ATA), the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) at Green Bank Observatory (GBO), and the Medicina Radio Astronomy Observatory, which is managed by Italy's National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF).
Finally, the SETI Institute will securely store the processed messages in Filecoin, the world’s largest decentralized storage network, to ensure the preservation and accessibility of the message data while guaranteeing its availability for further analysis and decoding work.
Problem: Traditional cloud storage solutions are susceptible to censorship
Storing the first message from an alien civilization in a secure, reliable, and resilient manner is a top priority for the SETI Institute. While traditional public cloud providers are a great fit for certain industries and use cases, protecting history-changing data is not one of them.
Traditional cloud provider challenges include:
Data breach
Storing "messages" in only a few data centers can increase the likelihood of malicious attacks such as data breaches. Hackers often view these servers as "honeypots" to steal or manipulate data.
Data interruption
Other hacking attacks, such as DDoS attacks, are also a common problem with traditional cloud storage services, where a single vulnerability can cause millions of people to be unable to access their "messages" for a long period of time.
Censorship: Centralized cloud storage providers are often under pressure from governments and institutions to regulate or shut down sites, which could open the door to censorship of “the message.”
Solution: Protecting “Information” with Filecoin
Franck Marchis, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, identified and selected Filecoin as the data storage solution for "A Sign in Space" because of its unique combination of security, resiliency, and durability. Decentralized storage solutions like Filecoin provide organizations like the SETI Institute with greater flexibility and control over their data. This approach differs from traditional cloud storage, where data is stored in a centralized location. With decentralized storage, data is stored across a network of computers. This provides advantages over traditional cloud storage, including:
Enhanced data security
Filecoin leverages immutability and decentralization to provide storage that is more resistant to malware and bad actor exploits than traditional storage. Filecoin never updates data in-place — it always writes a new data object that is completely separate from the previous “version” without deleting the original copy. Once an object is written, it cannot be edited, providing read-only access to the state of the data at the time of writing, but not the ability to modify that data, making it extremely unlikely that any type of ransomware can be exploited.
Improve data availability
Because organizations can specify the level of resiliency needed to meet availability requirements, Filecoin provides flexibility far beyond what any traditional public cloud storage provider can guarantee. With Filecoin, no two copies are stored on the same physical storage system, which increases the durability of data.
Data Integrity
Filecoin completes a data verification check every 24 hours to ensure that the copy of the customer's data is always the same as the original data. The "message" uploaded by the Academy will not be changed.