Distributed Data Storage Obfuscation With Erasure-Coded Shards
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Current network storage systems face security challenges, including data interception and hacking, especially in cloud-based storage, where encryption alone may not be sufficient to protect sensitive information, and distributed data storage systems struggle with authentication and data integrity across geographically spread servers.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a distributed network data storage system that uses erasure codes to encode data blocks, generating encoded data blocks with parity data, and distributing subsets of these blocks across multiple storage locations, allowing for decoding from a subset of the encoded data block, thereby ensuring data integrity and security through redundancy and dispersion.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of operation
If data is stored in centralized cloud-based storage systems, then storage accessibility and ease of operation are improved, but security against data interception and hacking deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent divides data into multiple data blocks and distributes them across multiple storage locations. Each storage location holds only a portion of the encoded data, making it impossible for attackers to retrieve complete data by compromising a single location. This segmentation approach maintains storage accessibility while significantly improving security against interception and hacking.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent implements nested encryption by first encoding data with erasure codes to create encoded data blocks, then encrypting these encoded blocks. This multi-layered approach (nested structure) provides defense in depth, where even if one layer is compromised, the data remains protected. The nested structure allows legitimate users to access data while preventing unauthorized access.
2Object-affected harmful factors
If encryption is applied to protect data in cloud storage, then security is improved, but authentication and data integrity verification become more complex
Solution Approach 1:
The patent incorporates feedback mechanisms through authentication tokens and data integrity verification. When data is stored, authentication tokens are generated and stored with the encoded data blocks. When retrieving data, the system verifies these tokens to ensure data integrity and proper authentication. This feedback loop simplifies the authentication process by providing automatic verification rather than manual checks.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs self-verification of data integrity through built-in authentication tokens and erasure code validation. The stored data contains sufficient information (authentication tokens, parity data) to verify its own integrity without requiring external verification systems. This self-service approach reduces the complexity of authentication while maintaining security.
3Reliability
If data is distributed across multiple storage locations, then security and fault tolerance are improved, but system complexity and difficulty of management increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent creates a universal data structure where encoded data blocks contain both data portions and authentication tokens. This multi-functional structure serves multiple purposes: data storage, authentication, and integrity verification. The standardized format simplifies management across distributed storage locations while maintaining fault tolerance, as the same structure works regardless of which storage location holds the data.
Solution Approach 2:
The system uses erasure codes to transform original data into encoded data blocks with specific parameters (k data blocks, n total blocks). By changing the parameter representation of data (from raw data to encoded blocks with parity), the system achieves fault tolerance while maintaining manageable complexity through standardized encoding/decoding operations. The parameters k and n provide control over the trade-off between redundancy and storage efficiency.
4Reliability
If erasure codes are used to encode data blocks, then data integrity and recoverability are improved, but processing time and computational complexity increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies partial action by encoding data with erasure codes to create more encoded blocks than strictly minimum required. This excessive encoding provides additional redundancy that speeds up recovery operations, as more parity information is available for faster error correction and data reconstruction. The trade-off of increased encoding time is offset by reduced decoding/recovery time.
Data Source
AI summary
Storing and accessing information in a distributed data storage system includes: using erasure code, encoding a data block of the information to generate an encoded data block comprising both parity data and the data block, wherein by using the erasure code the data block may be reconstituted from a subset of the encoded data block, the subset comprising less than all of the data block; distributing, for storage, portions of the subset across a plurality of network storage locations such that the subset is not stored in its entirety at any one of the plurality of network storage locations; retrieving the distributed portions from the plurality of network storage locations; reconstituting the subset from the distributed portions that are retrieved; and using the erasure code, reconstituting the data block from the reconstituted subset of the encoded data block.