Universally Weakly Secure Coset Coding Schemes for Minimum Storage Regenerating (MSR) Codes

TL;DR

This paper introduces universal coset coding schemes for MSR codes that provide weak security without requiring knowledge of the underlying storage code, facilitating practical distributed storage security.

Contribution

It proposes universal, separable coset coding schemes for MSR codes that do not depend on the storage code design, enabling practical weak security in distributed storage.

Findings

Schemes use small field sizes.

Applicable in scenarios where user does not know storage code.

Achieves weak security independently of storage code design.

Abstract

We consider the problem of designing codes for distributed storage that protect user data against eavesdroppers that can gain access to network links as well as individual nodes. Our goal is to achieve weak security (also known as block security) that requires that the eavesdroppers would not be able to decode individual files or combinations of a small number of files. The standard approach for achieving block security is to use a joint design scheme that consists of (inner) storage code and the (outer) coset code. However, jointly designing the codes requires that the user, who pre-processes and stores the files, should know the underlying storage code in order to design the (outer) linear transformation for achieving weak security. In many practical scenarios, such as storing the files on the third party cloud storage system, it may not be possible for the user to know the underlying storage code. In this work, we present universal schemes that separate the outer code design from the storage code design for minimum storage regenerating codes (MSR). Our schemes allow the independent design of the storage code and the outer code. Our schemes use small field size and can be used in a broad range of practical settings.