Paper 2010/214

How to Tell if Your Cloud Files Are Vulnerable to Drive Crashes

Kevin D. Bowers, Marten van Dijk, Ari Juels, Alina Oprea, and Ronald L. Rivest

Abstract

This paper presents a new challenge---verifying that a remote server is storing a file in a fault-tolerant manner, i.e., such that it can survive hard-drive failures. We describe an approach called the Remote Assessment of Fault Tolerance (RAFT). The key technique in a RAFT is to measure the time taken for a server to respond to a read request for a collection of file blocks. The larger the number of hard drives across which a file is distributed, the faster the read-request response. Erasure codes also play an important role in our solution. We describe a theoretical framework for RAFTs and show experimentally that RAFTs can work in practice.

Note: Updated to include testing performed against the Mozy online backup service.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Unknown where it was published
Keywords
applicationserasure codesstorage
Contact author(s)
ajuels @ rsa com
History
2011-05-13: last of 6 revisions
2010-04-19: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2010/214
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2010/214,
      author = {Kevin D.  Bowers and Marten van Dijk and Ari Juels and Alina Oprea and Ronald L.  Rivest},
      title = {How to Tell if Your Cloud Files Are Vulnerable to Drive Crashes},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2010/214},
      year = {2010},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/214}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/214}
}
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