Secure RAID Schemes for Distributed Storage

Abstract

We propose secure RAID, i.e., low-complexity schemes to store information in a distributed manner that is resilient to node failures and resistant to node eavesdropping. We generalize the concept of systematic encoding to secure RAID and show that systematic schemes have significant advantages in the efficiencies of encoding, decoding and random access. For the practical high rate regime, we construct three XOR-based systematic secure RAID schemes with optimal or almost optimal encoding and decoding complexities, from the EVENODD codes and B codes, which are array codes widely used in the RAID architecture. The schemes can tolerate up to two node failures and two eavesdropping nodes. For more general parameters we construct systematic secure RAID schemes from Reed-Solomon codes, and show that they are significantly more efficient than Shamir’s secret sharing scheme. Our results suggest that building “keyless”, information-theoretic security into the RAID architecture is practical.