Deleting files in the Celeste peer-to-peer storage system

Celeste is a robust peer-to-peer object store built on top of a distributed hash table (DHT). Celeste is a working system, developed by Sun Microsystems Laboratories. During the development of Celeste, we faced the challenge of complete object deletion, and moreover, of deleting “files” composed of several different objects. This important problem is not solved by merely deleting meta-data, as there are scenarios in which all file contents must be deleted, e.g., due to a court order. Complete file deletion in a realistic peer-to-peer storage system has not been previously dealt with due to the intricacy of the problem — the system may experience high churn rates, nodes may crash or have intermittent connectivity, and the overlay network may become partitioned at times. We present an algorithm that eventually deletes all file contents, data and meta-data, in the aforementioned complex scenarios. The algorithm is fully functional and has been successfully integrated into Celeste.