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USENIX Technical Program - Abstract - 13th Systems Administration Conference - LISA '99

rat: A Secure Archiving Program With Fast Retrieval

Willem A. (Vlakkies) Schreüder and Maria Murillo, University of Colorado at Boulder

Abstract

A new archive format called rat was developed. This format was designed to allow very fast retrieval of individual files. This is achieved using a table of contents to quickly find the file.

Each file in the archive is individually compressed with a compression method specific to the file. A user created configuration file is used to specify what type of compression to use on each file based on parameters such as the file extension and file size. Multiple sets of rules can be defined and activated from the command line to achieve different aims such as speed or size or to deal with different types of file sets. Parameters passed to the compression algorithms may also be specified.

The format also provides for signatures to be stored with the files. The program will generate and save the signature when the archive is created and verify the file when the archive is restored. Encryption is possible but not implemented.

The format is quite robust. If the archive is truncated or the table of contents is lost, the files in the portion that survived can still be recovered. Every file and table is preceded by a magic number so even recovery from bit rot may be possible.

The current implementation incorporates gzip (as zlib), bzip2, and LZO compression. Library versions of these compression algorithms are linked in for performance reasons. Only PGP signatures are currently implemented. Due to export restrictions on encryption software, a child process is spawned to execute a separate binary to do the signature creation and verification.

A library called librat implements all the functionality required to create the archive and restore files from the archive. Alternate user interfaces or embedded applications are therefore quite readily created. Three front ends to librat have been implemented. The first front end is a simple command line interface similar to tar. The second front end is character based interface that allows the user to browse the archive and selectively restore files similar to the restore program used with dump. The third front end is a GUI implemented using Qt.

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Last changed: 13 Feb 2002 ml
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