Unity 2.0: Secure and Durable Personal Cloud Storage

TL;DR

Unity 2.0 introduces a secure, consistent, and bandwidth-efficient personal cloud storage system that enhances security guarantees and supports multiple devices with minimal lease switching overhead.

Contribution

It presents Unity 2.0, a novel personal cloud storage system that ensures security, durability, and strong consistency while optimizing upload bandwidth for various workloads.

Findings

Unity consumes minimal upload bandwidth for compute-heavy workloads.

Unity's bandwidth usage for write-heavy workloads is comparable to NBD.

Read-heavy workloads with Unity use significantly less bandwidth, with room for further optimization.

Abstract

While personal cloud storage services such as Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive and iCloud have become very popular in recent years, these services offer few security guarantees to users. These cloud services are aimed at end users, whose applications often assume a local file system storage, and thus require strongly consistent data. In addition, users usually access these services using personal computers and portable devices such as phones and tablets, which are upload bandwidth constrained and in many cases battery powered. Unity is a system that provides confidentiality, integrity, durability and strong consistency while minimizing the upload bandwidth of its clients. We find that Unity consumes minimal upload bandwidth for compute-heavy workload compared to NFS and Dropbox, while uses similar amount of upload bandwidth for write-heavy workload relative to NBD. Although read-heavy workload tends to consume more upload bandwidth with Unity, it is no more than an eighth of the size of blocks replicated and there is much room for optimization. Moreover, Unity provides flexibility to maintain multiple DEs to provide scalability for multiple devices to concurrently access the data with the minimal lease switch cost.