Upspin is an experimental project to build a framework for naming and sharing files and other data securely, uniformly, and globally: a global name system of sorts.

It is not a file system, but a set of protocols and reference implementations that can be used to join things like file systems and other storage services to the name space.

Performance is not a primary goal. Uniformity and security are.



The search giant adds: "Upsin is a layer of infrastructure that other software and services can build on to facilitate secure access and sharing. This is an open source contribution, not a Google product. We have not yet integrated with the Key Transparency server, though we expect to eventually, and for now use a similar technique of securely publishing all key updates. File storage is inherently an archival medium without forward secrecy; loss of the user's encryption keys implies loss of content, though we do provide for key rotation."