GNU Anastasis

GNU Anastasis is a Free Software protocol and implementation that allows users to securely deposit core secrets with an open set of escrow providers and to recover these secrets if their original copies are lost. Anastasis is free software and part of the GNU project.

Currently, GNU Anastasis is released as alpha-quality software. When testing Anastasis, please choose "demoland" as your country of residence! It is not yet production ready! You cannot rely on it to keep your secrets recoverable today! In particular, we need to still review the various country-specific questions used to create unique user identifiers at the beginning of the backup and recovery process. Community feedback on those inputs would be particularly welcome!

Key features that distinguish Anastasis from other projects are:

  • Multiple independent providers store key shares
  • Providers learn nothing about their users during backup
  • Providers only learn required data for authentication (not key share) during recovery
  • Integrated privacy-preserving payments with GNU Taler
  • Authentication requirements configured by end-user
  • Flexible recovery policies, not only k-out-of-n
  • Pluggable authentication methods (today: SMS, e-mail, snail mail, security question and IBAN wire transfer)
  • Commercial support available via Anastasis SARL

Anastasis was started because GNU Taler needed a privacy-preserving way for users to recover encryption keys for backups of the Taler wallet. Furthermore, we were told by regulators that data recovery could not hinge on a user remembering a strong passphrase. Existing alternatives were either non-free, relied on a single-provider's trustworthiness, did not maintain confidentiality of the key at all times, or required the user to involve their friends in safekeeping their keys. In contrast, Anastasis is designed to provide the best possible privacy by design and a viable business model for commercial escrow providers.

Table of Contents

Downloading Anastasis

Source Code
Anastasis is available from the main GNU FTP server via HTTP(S) and FTP. It can also be found on the GNU mirrors; please use a mirror if possible.
Debian package
A Debian package can be downloaded from the GNU Taler Debian package repository. Instructions for adding this repository are in our documentation.
Tar Package
The latest version can be found on GNU mirrors. If the mirror does not work, you should be able to find them on the main FTP server.

Latest release is anastasis-latest.tar.gz. Latest release of the Gtk+ GUI is anastasis-gtk-latest.tar.gz.

Documentation

In addition to the brief documentation on this webpage, we have various other forms of documentation available:

Manual
The manual for GNU Anastasis includes everything from a project overview to internals about the system. After installing Anastasis, you can find the same information also by running info anastasis.
Thesis
A Bachelor's thesis documents the original design and implementation.

Mailing lists

Anastasis uses the anastasis mailinglist to discuss all aspects of Anastasis, including support, development and enhancement requests, as well as bug reports.

Announcements about Anastasis and most other GNU software are made on info-gnu (archive). You can also subscribe to our RSS feed.

Security reports that should not be made immediately public can be sent directly to the maintainer. If there is no response to an urgent issue, you can escalate to the general security mailing list for advice.

Getting involved

Development of Anastasis, and GNU in general, is a volunteer effort, and you can contribute. For information, please read How to help GNU. If you'd like to get involved, it's a good idea to join the discussion mailing list (see above).

Development
Known bugs and open feature requests are tracked in our bugtracker. You need to sign up for a reporter account. Please make sure you report bugs under Anastasis and not under any of the other projects.
Git access

You can access the current development version of Anastasis using

$ git clone https://git.taler.net/anastasis.git
$ git clone https://git.taler.net/anastasis-git.git

Our GNU website is kept at

$ cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/web/anastasis co anastasis

Quick Introduction

Dependencies
Anastasis depends on various other GNU packages, including GNU Taler, GNUnet and GNU Libmicrohttpd.
Projects that use GNU Anastasis
If you write an application that uses Anastasis, please let us know so that we can add you to the list!
Alternatives
If you are aware of a competing free software project that might be a better fit for some users, please let us know so that we can add it to the list!

Licensing

Anastasis is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the GNU Affero GPL v3 or at your option any later version. If you have questions about licensing, especially when it comes to integrate Anastasis into some third party software, please contact the maintainer. We are in general open to changing the license of the client-side logic to enable broader use.