OpenKeyval

• The live version of the service has been sunset.
• This codebase is no longer being maintained by the creators.

Overview

OpenKeyval is a persistent key/value store, presented as a simple web service. OpenKeyval provides everyone with free, unauthenticated access to its server. Anyone can write up to 64 KiB of data to any key. After writing a value, a read-only version of the key is returned, which allows you to safely provide read-only access to data without worrying that the other person might change its value.

OpenKeyval requires no authentication and provides absolutely no guarantees of privacy. The key to the entire system is obscurity; suitably obscure keys are unlikely to be guessed by other users, and therefore safe. Read-only keys allow you to delegate access to other users without worrying about them making changes.

Setting it up

OpenKeyval is a relatively simple application, but it has a few requirements. Here's the gist of it:

• You must serve the openkeyval directory from the root of your server
• Your server needs to support the RewriteRules in .htaccess
• The script must be able to write to the data/ subdirectory, which it will try to create in the openkeyval directory
• Invent your own salt to use when hashing values and put it into a file called salt.txt, in the same directory as the source code. This prevents malicious users from using rainbow tables to reverse a read-only key into a writable one.

Wishlist

• Server
  • Refactor server to use Rails-style routing
• JavaScript
  • Optional caching using localStorage
  • OpenKeyval.isValidKey method