Wait a minute, if you rely on random computers worldwide, how is the data kept secure and always available?
This is the million dollar question. We assume that all Symform nodes are insecure and unreliable. This is the basic foundation of our architecture. We address this by encrypting the data using the 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) at source. AES has been sanctioned by the NSA and adopted by the U.S. federal government. We then divide the encrypted data into 64MB blocks. Each block is then shredded in 64 1MB fragments. Then, we add 32 parity fragments to every block using an error correction algorithm called Reed-Solomon. These resulting 96 encrypted fragments are then distributed randomly to 96 nodes within the Symform Storage Cloud. We call this RAID-96TM. If you are interested in exactly how we shred data (or if you just need something to put you to sleep), please read How Symform Processes and Stores Data.
