Fault-tolerant and secure networked storage

This paper proposes a coding-based fault-tolerant and secure scheme for networked storage systems which is suitable for different architectures, such as peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, Grids and Clouds. Unlike replication-based schemes, the proposed scheme encodes and inserts into a data object with little redundancy, instead of using replicas of the whole object, to make the systems fault-tolerant. The scheme divides the data object into blocks, encodes the blocks, encrypts the blocks by light-weight XOR operations with a secret key, rearranges the encrypted blocks into pieces, and stores the pieces in separate computers or nodes. The scheme is fault-tolerant in the sense that the original object is available even if some of the pieces cannot be accessed due to node and/or link failures. The scheme is also secure in the sense that the data object can be reconstructed only if the correct secret key is provided. The scheme is compared with related ones to show its advantages.