Secure Clustered Distributed Storage Against Eavesdropping

Abstract

This paper investigates interplay among storage overhead, bandwidth requirement, and security constraint in distributed storage. In the model used in our analysis, storage nodes are dispersed in multiple clusters. When a node fails, necessary content gets restored by downloading data from different nodes that may possibly be in other clusters. The bandwidth required for transferring data for node repair is assumed more scarce for cluster-to-cluster links than the links connecting intra-cluster nodes. Eavesdropping takes place on links across clusters only, and a fraction of the total number of clusters is assumed compromised. When a cluster is compromised, any repair traffic going in and out of it is eavesdropped. For this clustered model with eavesdroppers, we analyze the security of distributed storage systems (DSSs) and provide guidelines on designing system solutions for securing the data. First, under the setting of functional repair, we derive a general upper bound on the secrecy capacity, the maximum data size that can be stored in DSSs with perfect secrecy. In the practically important bandwidth-limited regime where the node storage size is equal to the repair bandwidth, the upper bound is shown to be achievable through proposed code constructions. Moreover, we obtain a closed-form expression for the required system resources-node storage size and repair bandwidth-to store a given amount of data with perfect secrecy. Second, we investigate the behavior of secrecy capacity as the number of compromised clusters increases. According to our mathematical analysis, the secrecy capacity decreases as a quadratic function until the number of compromised clusters reaches a certain threshold. Finally, based on the fundamental relationship between the system resources and the secrecy capacity, we provide a guideline on balancing intra- and cross-cluster repair bandwidths depending on the given system security level.