Auditor Assisted Data Extraction With Privacy Preservation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current storage providers lack reliable and accountable mechanisms for data integrity verification, leaving clients to blindly trust the service or manually verify data integrity, which is difficult for typical users, and there are no fair mechanisms for holding providers accountable for data loss.
Innovation Solution
A set of third-party data retrieval protocols that use a third-party auditor to verify the integrity of encrypted data and encryption keys without revealing the underlying data, allowing the client to recover their data without maintaining any state or secret keys, and ensuring the auditor's privacy preserves the client's data.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If clients retrieve and verify data integrity manually, then data integrity verification is achieved, but client burden and complexity increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an auditor as an intermediary third party that clients trust to verify storage provider integrity. The auditor performs verification on behalf of clients, eliminating the need for clients to manually verify data integrity while maintaining reliability through the auditor's independent oversight
2Ease of operation
If clients blindly trust storage providers, then ease of operation is maintained, but reliability and accountability are compromised
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements a feedback mechanism where auditors independently verify storage provider integrity and report findings to clients. This provides clients with reliable information about data safety without requiring them to perform verification themselves, maintaining both convenience and reliability
3Measurement precision
If auditors access encrypted data to verify integrity, then verification capability is improved, but client privacy is compromised
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies different quality requirements to different parts of the data: encrypted data is stored and verified without decryption to protect privacy, while unencrypted metadata (hashes, signatures) is stored and verified to enable integrity checking. This local differentiation allows verification without compromising privacy
4Reliability
If clients maintain signatures of hosted data for verification, then data integrity can be verified, but client complexity and storage burden increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts the verification burden from the client system by having the auditor maintain and verify signatures independently. Clients only need to trust the auditor's verification process rather than implementing and maintaining their own signature verification infrastructure
Data Source
AI summary
Various approaches for extracting client's data from a storage provider are presented. In one approach, an auditor is initialized with a verification data set that confirms that an initial version of a data set stored by the storage provider is intact. The auditor extracts a second version of the data set from the storage provider; the second version hides information specified by the data set from the auditor. The auditor determines whether the second version matches the initial version. The second version is returned to the client if the initial version matches the second version. The auditor is prevented from recovering the information specified by the data set using the state information, and the client need not store any state information related to the initial and second versions needed to recover the information specified by the data set. If the initial version does not match the second version, the auditor outputs data indicative of data corruption.