Weakly Secure Regenerating Codes for Distributed Storage

TL;DR

This paper introduces a weak security coding scheme for distributed storage that prevents leakage of meaningful information to eavesdroppers observing any single node, without sacrificing storage capacity.

Contribution

It proposes a novel coset coding scheme combined with a Product-Matrix regenerating code to achieve weak security with minimal field size and no capacity loss.

Findings

Achieves weak security against single-node eavesdroppers

Requires small finite field size for implementation

Maintains full storage capacity without security loss

Abstract

We consider the problem of secure distributed data storage under the paradigm of \emph{weak security}, in which no \emph{meaningful information} is leaked to the eavesdropper. More specifically, the eavesdropper cannot get any information about any individual message file or a small group of files. The key benefit of the weak security paradigm is that it incurs no loss in the storage capacity, which makes it practically appealing. In this paper, we present a coding scheme, using a coset coding based outer code and a Product-Matrix Minimum Bandwidth Regenerating code (proposed by Rashmi et al.) as an inner code, that achieves weak security when the eavesdropper can observe any single storage node. We show that the proposed construction has good security properties and requires small finite field size.