Free Haven consists of two different system - Publication system and communication channel. The publication system is a back end of communication channel. There are 3 agents in the publication system: author, publisher and reader. These agents are layered over the communication channel and communication with each other via addresses which are implemented as remailer reply blocks (remailer reply blocks: collection of encrypted routing instruction which serve as an address for a pseudonym on the network.)
Free Haven is based upon communities of servers called servnet. The servnet is formed based upon trust among the servers. Each server hosts data from the other server in exchange for the opportunity to store its own data in the network. The servers transfer data by trading storage space in its own. To store a data in the servnet, a server also need to contribute storage space for others.
Each server has a public key and one reply blocks. The documents are indexed by the hash of the public key from the key pair which was used to sign the shares of the document. To locate a server that contains certain document, readers need to generate their own key pair and remail reply block. The server broadcasts a request along with the readers' public key and the reply block.
The servers that receive the broadcast checks to see if it has any shares of the request. If it does, it encrypts each share using the public key posted by the reader enclosed in the request, then send the encrypted share through the remailer to the enclosed address.
The data are split into shares and stored on different servers. Publishers assign an expiration date to document when they are published; servers make a promise to keep their shares of a given document until its expiration date has reached. If a server drops data early, the trust level of the server decrease.
When storing the data, each server agrees to store data for the other servers without considering legal or moral issues.
Free Haven is precedent of Tor. The Tor system is well explained in its website. Click Here.
Most of this information is from the paper "The Free Haven Project: Distributed Anonymous Storage Service." The PDF file can be found here.
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