Security Concerns in Minimum Storage Cooperative Regenerating Codes

TL;DR

This paper investigates the secrecy capacity of minimum storage cooperative regenerating (MSCR) codes under a specific eavesdropper model, introduces the concept of stable MSCR codes to enhance secrecy, and analyzes their capacity.

Contribution

It defines stable MSCR codes, shows existing codes are unstable with poor secrecy, converts a code to stable form, and characterizes their secrecy capacity.

Findings

Existing MSCR codes are not stable and have low secrecy capacity.

Converting MSCR codes to stable form improves secrecy capacity.

Theoretical analysis characterizes the secrecy capacity of stable MSCR codes.

Abstract

Here, we revisit the problem of exploring the secrecy capacity of minimum storage cooperative regenerating (MSCR) codes under the $\{l_1,l_2\}$-eavesdropper model, where the eavesdropper can observe the data stored on $l_1$ nodes and the repair downloads of an additional $l_2$ nodes. Compared to minimum storage regenerating (MSR) codes which support only single node repairs, MSCR codes allow efficient simultaneous repairs of multiple failed nodes, referred to as a \emph{repair group}. However, the repair data sent from a helper node to another failed node may vary with different repair groups or the sets of helper nodes, which would inevitably leak more data information to the eavesdropper and even render the storage system unable to maintain any data secrecy. In this paper, we introduce and study a special category of MSCR codes, termed "\emph{stable}" MSCR codes, where the repair data from any one helper node to any one failed node is required to be independent of the repair group or the set of helper nodes. Our main contributions include: 1. Demonstrating that two existing MSCR codes inherently are not stable and thus have poor secrecy capacity, 2. Converting one existing MSCR code to a stable one, which offers better secrecy capacity when compared to the original one, 3. Employing information theoretic analysis to characterize the secrecy capacity of stable MSCR codes in certain situations.