Middleware for a Re-configurable Distributed Archival Store Based on Secret Sharing
Abstract
Modern storage systems are often faced with complex
trade-offs between the confidentiality, availability, and performance
they offer their users. Secret sharing is a data encoding technique that
provides information-theoretically provable guarantees on
confidentiality unlike conventional encryption. Additionally, secret
sharing provides quantifiable guarantees on the availability of the
encoded data. We argue that these properties make secret sharing-based
encoding of data particularly suitable for the design of increasingly
popular and important distributed archival data stores. These
guarantees, however, come at the cost of increased resource consumption
during reads/writes. Consequently, it is desirable that such a storage
system employ techniques that could dynamically transform data
representation to operate the store within required confidentiality,
availability, and performance regimes (or budgets) despite changes to
the operating environment. Since state-of-the-art transformation
techniques suffer from prohibitive data transfer overheads, we develop a
middleware for dynamic data transformation. Using this, we propose the
design and operation of a secure, available, and tunable distributed
archival store called FlexArchive. Using a combination of analysis and
empirical evaluation, we demonstrate the feasibility of our archival
store. In particular, we demonstrate that FlexArchive can achieve
dynamic data re-configurations in significantly lower times (factor of
50 or more) without any sacrifice in confidentiality and with a
negligible loss in availability (less than 1%).
Origin | Files produced by the author(s) |
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