Composing private and censorship-resistant solutions for distributed storage

Abstract

Cloud storage has durably entered the stage as go-to solution for business and personal storage. Virtually extending storage capabilities to infinity, cloud storage enables companies and individuals to focus on content creation without fear of running out of space or losing data. But as users entrust more and more data to the cloud, they also have to accept a loss of control over the data they o˜oad to the cloud. At a time when online services seem to be making a significant part of their profits by exploiting customer data, concerns over privacy and integrity of said data naturally arise. Are their online documents read by the storage provider or its employees? Is the content of these documents shared with third party partners of the storage provider? What happens if the provider goes bankrupt? Whatever answer can be o˙ered by the storage provider, the loss of control should be cause for concern. But storage providers also have to worry about trust and reliability. As they build distributed solutions to accommodate their customers’ needs, these concerns of control extend to the infrastructure they operate on. Conciliating security, confidentiality, resilience and perform-ance over large sets of distributed storage nodes is a tricky balancing act. And even when a suitable balance can be found, it is often done at the expense of increased storage overhead. In this dissertation, we try to mitigate these issues by focusing on three aspects. First, we study solutions to empower users with flexible tooling ensuring security, integrity and redundancy in distributed storage settings. By leveraging public cloud storage o˙erings to build a configurable file system and storage middleware, we show that securing cloud-storage from the client-side is an e˙ective way maintaining control. Second, we build a distributed archive whose resilience goes beyond standard redundancy schemes. To achieve this, we implement Recast, relying on a data entanglement scheme, that encodes and distributes data over a set of storage nodes to ensure durability at a manageable cost. Finally, we look into o˙setting the increase in storage overhead by means of data reduction. This is made possible by the use of Generalised Deduplication, a scheme that improves over classical data deduplication by detecting similarities beyond exact matches.