Osiris (software)

• The system is anonymous. It is not possible to make an association between a user and their IP address, hence one cannot trace the person who created a content.
• Even with physical access to an Osiris installation it is impossible to trace the actual user without knowing his password.
• 2048-bit digital keys guarantee the authenticity of content (digitally signed in order to prevent counterfeiting) and the confidentiality of private messages (encrypted between the sender and recipient).
• To prevent the ISP from intercepting traffic, connections and data transfer to a portal (called alignment), Osiris uses random ports which are cloaked during handshake and encrypted point-to-point via 256-bit AES.
• The P2P distribution allows content to be present in multiple copies as a guarantee of survival in case of hardware failure or nodes off-line.
• As the portals are saved locally, one can read the contents even if one works off-line.

The Reputations system and the subsequent generation of multiple points of view of a portal is one of the most innovative aspects of the program. Unlike "traditional" systems where the computational work (calculation of statistics, indexing of content, etc.) is always made by a central server, Osiris use a distributed approach, where the majority of the works is made by users of a portal, due to this there may be more distinct points of view of a portal, depending on used account.

Each user is free to give reputation (positive or negative) to another user according to its contribution to the portal, based on these reputations, the system processes the pages by removing the contents of users evaluated negatively (such as spammers) and importing the reputations of users considered positively. This allow the creation of a network of assessments that allows management of a portal. Note that each client processes the data independently on its machine in a process that is called stabilization of the portal.

When a user creates an Osiris portal, the user must choose between two systems of moderation, namely "anarchist" and "monarchy". The choice cannot be changed after the portal is created. In an anarchic portal, every user can rate another user and thus influence that user's reputation among all users of the portal. In this way, a portal can be moderated without the use of a central server. The first reputation is always positive and is set to the administrator, the user who publishes the invitation link (digitally signed) to the portal. In a monarchy portal, only the portal administrator and moderators can generate reputations, and delete or promote contents on the portal.

Isis is a web gateway to Osiris portals, written in PHP 5, through which it is possible to browse a portal without installing Osiris.

The particularity of Isis is the management of the workload and the data, which don't lie on the public server that is running Isis, but is managed by the various nodes running Osiris. Isis only forwards web requests from visitors to the nodes that have become available to it, minimizing the use of resources from the server through the load-balancing of requests.

Since it is not technically possible to guarantee anonymity in this type of architecture, all accesses by Isis are read-only. This has the dual objective of ensuring the privacy of users and encourage the use of Osiris to actively participate to a portal.