INFOBEYOND TECHNOLOGY LLC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: Simply encrypted data storage is unable to prevent data loss or compromise if the storage

Description

Simply encrypted data storage is unable to prevent data loss or compromise if the storage device is damaged or compromised by an adversary. Distributed data storage is the alternative that divides the original data into fragments and secretly stored them on distributed devices with certain redundancy. The original data can be fully recovered by a user from a subset of storage nodes and the adversary knows nothing from the partial information. The current distributed storage approaches are developed for the Internet and inapplicable to a mobile wireless mesh network. In this proposal, we develop Secure, Resilient, and Faulty-tolerant Distributed Storage (SRFDS) to meet the needs of distributed storage in the military mesh network. SRFDS optimizes the erasure coding parameters with the consideration of node communication capacity, number of storage nodes, and file size. The storage nodes are optimally selected from the storage capable nodes to improve the storage performance. The faulty-handling model ensures the success of storing a file. Furthermore, a novel keying algorithm is proposed for key generation and EAP (Extensive Authentication Protocol) is improved for user and device authentication. When a storage node is compromised, self-regeneration scheme regenerates the fragment to maintain the data completion.