Privacy
By design, not by promise.
Encryption happens on your device before anything leaves it. A block on someone else's node is meaningless alone. No operator, including the project, holds a key.
People · Nodes · Trust
Storage that belongs to the community that uses it.
RAIN is a bio-inspired storage network: your files are split into encrypted fragments and spread across a village of ordinary always-on devices, so no single failure — and no single company — can lose, read, or withhold them.
Fig. 1 — the architecture
Redundant Array of Independent Nodes
Illustration only — node count and links are schematic. The worked example in the text (nine blocks, any six) is the paper's r = 1.5.
A play on RAID, at the scale of a town. A file is cut into K = r·N erasure-coded blocks, and any N of them rebuild it; at the paper's ratio of r = 1.5, a file kept as twelve blocks survives losing any four. Blocks live in a village of K nodes that trade storage with each other — each node contributing a fixed share (the paper models Z = 100 GB per node). Nodes watch each other's availability through Merkle-tree hashes on a shared ledger; when too many blocks go dark, the village regenerates them on its own.
In the paper's model, a village of 36 nodes gives a file an expected lifetime on the order of the age of the Earth.
- Central point of failure
- None
- Storage ratio (paper)
- r = 1.5
- Who can read your data
- You
- Who owns the network
- Its users
- License
- Licensed by Domus-Lux LLC
Resilience
Rooted in ecology.
The early Internet's protocols allowed redundancy, self-repair, and self-organization: single nodes fail, new ones join, the whole keeps working. RAIN brings that resilience — the paper calls it rooted in ecology — back to where data actually lives.
Sustainability
No data center to feed.
More than 3% of the world's power consumption goes to data centers, and it is rising. Storage on low-energy devices that are already on, already in homes, adds almost nothing.
The doctrine
Security protects the provider. Trust protects you from the provider.
Every cloud sells security: firewalls, audits, certifications. All of it defends the company that holds your data. RAIN is built so that no operator can read, lose, rewrite, or withhold what you store. Privacy is not a policy here. It is the architecture.
The paper puts it as an ownership question: move the power of global trusted third parties to local citizens and businesses. The same network can carry what those third parties sell today — telecommunication, content delivery, cryptocurrency, and the distributed administration of a town or a region.
- Against the cloud
- A data center is one owner, one key, one place to subpoena or breach. In RAIN the data has no operator: blocks are encrypted on your device and recoverable only by you.
- Against storage-trading networks (Storj)
- Those systems assume reliable, well-connected machines. RAIN is engineered for the opposite — home-grade connections and drives that fail — and gets its reliability from the village's erasure coding and self-repair, not from the hardware.
- Against blockchains
- A blockchain needs global, asynchronous consensus, so it burns CPU on proof-of-work and moves slowly. RAIN's nodes are always on, so a village keeps a local ledger and secures itself with proofs of space over storage it already has — no mining, no dedicated hardware.
What it's for
Infrastructure first.
Applications on top.
RAIN is not a product; it is the ground a product stands on. The first application is deliberately small and concrete. The program behind it — the services the paper lists, run by the people who use them — is not.
-
Built · first instance
Case management for a legal office
Intake screening against public court and corrections records, a review queue before anything touches a file, and an append-only event log — every action recorded, none rewritable. Designed for a New Mexico legal office. No SSNs, ever.
Proof of concept · [STATUS] -
Proposed
Public-records requests
The request, the response, and the case file on the same substrate — so the record of who asked for what outlives the office that answered.
[STATUS] -
Proposed
Custody of archives
Scanned records, deeds, and institutional memory held across independent nodes instead of one vendor's disk — custody a family, a firm, or a county can actually keep.
[STATUS] -
Proposed
Public trust in cyberspace
The end state argued in the Northern Lights paper: civic systems whose records cannot be quietly altered, and whose owners are the people they serve.
[STATUS]
Reading
The research, and the argument.
Paper · 2017
RAIN: A Bio-Inspired Communication and Data Storage Infrastructure
Monti & Rasmussen. Artificial Life 23(4), 552–557. MIT Press.
Paper · in progress
Operation Northern Lights
[PLACEHOLDER — public trust in cyberspace; Section V: AI + RAIN as the end state. Title, authors, and abstract to follow.]
Cited in the paper, and the lineage behind it
- Reed, I. S. & Solomon, G. (1960). Polynomial codes over certain finite fields. J. SIAM 8, 300–304. doi
- Merkle, R. C. (1988). A digital signature based on a conventional encryption function. CRYPTO '87. doi
- Dziembowski, S., Faust, S., Kolmogorov, V. & Pietrzak, K. (2015). Proofs of space. CRYPTO 2015, 585–605. doi
- Miller, A., Hicks, M., Katz, J. & Shi, E. (2014). Authenticated data structures, generically. SIGPLAN Notices 49(1), 411–423. doi
- Nakamoto, S. (2008). Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system. pdf
- Wilkinson, S. et al. (2016). Storj — a peer-to-peer cloud storage network. pdf
- Monti, M., Rasmussen, S., Moschettini, M. & Posani, L. (2017). An alternative information plan. Working paper, Santa Fe Institute. [LINK]
- Rasmussen, S. (2016). The BINC manifesto: Technology-driven societal changes. Proc. ALife XV, 53–54. MIT Press. [LINK]
- Bedau, M. A., McCaskill, J. S., Packard, N. H. & Rasmussen, S. (2010). Living technology: Exploiting life's principles in technology. Artificial Life 16(1), 89–97. doi
People
Who is behind RAIN
- Matteo Monti[ROLE · AFFILIATION]
- Leif C. Rasmussen[ROLE · AFFILIATION]
- Kaegan McDaniel[ROLE · AFFILIATION]
Run a node
A Raspberry Pi and a flash drive is enough.
Nodes are ordinary devices that are already on. Yours stores encrypted fragments of your neighbors' data; theirs store yours.
- 1Install the node software on any always-on device.
- 2Offer storage. Set how much; change it any time.
- 3Store your own files in the network. Encrypted before they leave.