Walrus: An Efficient Decentralized Storage Network

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Danezis, George, Giuliari, Giacomo, Kogias, Eleftherios Kokoris, Legner, Markus, Smith, Jean-Pierre, Sonnino, Alberto, Wüst, Karl
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Danezis, George
Giuliari, Giacomo
Kogias, Eleftherios Kokoris
Legner, Markus
Smith, Jean-Pierre
Sonnino, Alberto
Wüst, Karl
author_facet Danezis, George
Giuliari, Giacomo
Kogias, Eleftherios Kokoris
Legner, Markus
Smith, Jean-Pierre
Sonnino, Alberto
Wüst, Karl
contents Decentralized storage systems face a fundamental trade-off between replication overhead, recovery efficiency, and security guarantees. Current approaches either rely on full replication, incurring substantial storage costs, or employ trivial erasure coding schemes that struggle with efficient recovery especially under high storage-node churn. We present Walrus, a novel decentralized blob storage system that addresses these limitations through multiple technical innovations. At the core of Walrus is RedStuff, a two-dimensional erasure coding protocol that achieves high security with only 4.5x replication factor, while enabling self-healing recovery that requires bandwidth proportional to only the lost data $(O(|blob|/n)$ versus $O(|blob|)$ in traditional systems). Crucially, RedStuff is the first protocol to support storage challenges in asynchronous networks, preventing adversaries from exploiting network delays to pass verification without actually storing data. Walrus also introduces a novel multi-stage epoch change protocol that efficiently handles storage node churn while maintaining uninterrupted availability during committee transitions. Our system incorporates authenticated data structures to defend against malicious clients and ensures data consistency throughout storage and retrieval processes. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that Walrus achieves practical performance at scale, making it suitable for a wide range of decentralized applications requiring high-integrity, available blob storage with reasonable overhead.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_05370
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Walrus: An Efficient Decentralized Storage Network
Danezis, George
Giuliari, Giacomo
Kogias, Eleftherios Kokoris
Legner, Markus
Smith, Jean-Pierre
Sonnino, Alberto
Wüst, Karl
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Cryptography and Security
Decentralized storage systems face a fundamental trade-off between replication overhead, recovery efficiency, and security guarantees. Current approaches either rely on full replication, incurring substantial storage costs, or employ trivial erasure coding schemes that struggle with efficient recovery especially under high storage-node churn. We present Walrus, a novel decentralized blob storage system that addresses these limitations through multiple technical innovations. At the core of Walrus is RedStuff, a two-dimensional erasure coding protocol that achieves high security with only 4.5x replication factor, while enabling self-healing recovery that requires bandwidth proportional to only the lost data $(O(|blob|/n)$ versus $O(|blob|)$ in traditional systems). Crucially, RedStuff is the first protocol to support storage challenges in asynchronous networks, preventing adversaries from exploiting network delays to pass verification without actually storing data. Walrus also introduces a novel multi-stage epoch change protocol that efficiently handles storage node churn while maintaining uninterrupted availability during committee transitions. Our system incorporates authenticated data structures to defend against malicious clients and ensures data consistency throughout storage and retrieval processes. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that Walrus achieves practical performance at scale, making it suitable for a wide range of decentralized applications requiring high-integrity, available blob storage with reasonable overhead.
title Walrus: An Efficient Decentralized Storage Network
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.05370