The Free Haven Project was formed in 1999 by a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students with the aim to develop a secure, decentralized system of data storage.
[1] The group's work led to a collaboration with the United States Naval Research Laboratory to develop Tor, funded by DARPA.
[2][3] The Project's early work focused on an anonymous storage system, Free Haven, which was designed to ensure the privacy and security of both readers and publishers.
Free Haven is a distributed peer-to-peer system designed to create a "servnet" consisting of "servnet nodes" which each hold fragments ("shares") of documents, divided using Rabin's Information dispersal algorithm such that the publisher or file contents cannot be determined by any one piece.
[12] A referral- or recommendation-based "metatrust" reputation system built into the servnet attempts to ensure reciprocity and information value by holding node operators accountable.