MoPS: A Modular Protection Scheme for Long-Term Storage

TL;DR

MoPS is a flexible, modular protection scheme designed to ensure long-term data authenticity and integrity across various storage architectures, adaptable to different application needs.

Contribution

It introduces a modular, plug-and-play protection scheme for long-term data security that integrates with existing storage systems and supports customization.

Findings

Implemented MoPS and evaluated its performance.

Provides user guidance and external verification features.

Supports diverse application scenarios with customizable techniques.

Abstract

Current trends in technology, such as cloud computing, allow outsourcing the storage, backup, and archiving of data. This provides efficiency and flexibility, but also poses new risks for data security. It in particular became crucial to develop protection schemes that ensure security even in the long-term, i.e. beyond the lifetime of keys, certificates, and cryptographic primitives. However, all current solutions fail to provide optimal performance for different application scenarios. Thus, in this work, we present MoPS, a modular protection scheme to ensure authenticity and integrity for data stored over long periods of time. MoPS does not come with any requirements regarding the storage architecture and can therefore be used together with existing archiving or storage systems. It supports a set of techniques which can be plugged together, combined, and migrated in order to create customized solutions that fulfill the requirements of different application scenarios in the best possible way. As a proof of concept we implemented MoPS and provide performance measurements. Furthermore, our implementation provides additional features, such as guidance for non-expert users and export functionalities for external verifiers.