Design of a Secure and Fault Tolerant Environment for Distributed Storage

Abstract

We discuss the design and evaluation of a secure and fault tolerant storage infrastructure for un-trusted distributed computing environments. Previous designs of storage systems for this space have tended to use decoupled mechanisms for achieving fault tolerance and security. Our design, based on cryptographic properties of error-correction codes, combines redundancy (for fault tolerance) and encryption (for security) in a single unified framework. Our protocol can handle Byzantine faults and ensures confidentiality in a completely un-trusted environment. We qualitatively demonstrate the practicability of this approach. We also carry out quantitative comparison of our scheme and two other approaches, viz., Pure replication based techniques and SecureIDA scheme, and discuss their mertis and demerits.