Multi-drive Secret Sharing for Storage Security
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing storage systems face challenges in securely protecting data from unauthorized access, especially during transportation or when storage devices are lost or stolen, as traditional password-based solutions are inadequate and prone to vulnerabilities.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a secret sharing scheme that unifies multiple storage devices logically, requiring a threshold number of devices to reconstruct the master secret for decryption, ensuring data accessibility only when a sufficient number of devices are present, thereby preventing unauthorized access.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If a password is used to protect data on storage devices, then unauthorized access is prevented, but the password may be stolen or lost, compromising security and accessibility
Solution Approach 1:
The master secret is segmented into multiple shares using secret sharing schemes, distributing cryptographic protection across multiple storage devices rather than relying on a single password. Each share alone is insufficient to decrypt data, but a threshold number of shares can reconstruct the master secret, eliminating the vulnerability of centralized password storage.
2Reliability
If data is encrypted with a master secret stored on storage devices, then data confidentiality is maintained, but a single point of failure exists if the storage device is lost or stolen
Solution Approach 1:
The master secret is divided into multiple shares that are distributed across different storage devices. This segmentation eliminates the single point of failure problem, as losing one device does not compromise the entire system. The secret management complexity is reduced through automated threshold reconstruction mechanisms.
Solution Approach 2:
The encryption scheme employs nested layers of protection where individual device keys are encrypted by the master secret, which itself is reconstructed from shares. This nested structure allows for hierarchical key management where lower-level encryption keys are protected by higher-level secret sharing mechanisms.
3Reliability
If multiple storage devices are used to store data, then data redundancy and security are improved, but unauthorized access risk increases if devices are lost or stolen
Solution Approach 1:
Cryptographic shares are segmented across multiple storage devices, ensuring that no single device contains sufficient information to compromise security. The threshold-based reconstruction mechanism ensures that even if multiple devices are compromised, unauthorized access is prevented unless the threshold is met.
Solution Approach 2:
The master secret acts as an intermediary that bridges multiple device-specific encryption keys. It enables coordinated decryption across devices while preventing any single device from independently accessing protected data, thus mediating security between redundancy and access control.
Data Source
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AI summary
A system, method, and computer-readable storage medium for protecting a set of storage devices using a secret sharing scheme. The data of each storage device is encrypted with a key, and the key is encrypted based on a shared secret and a device-specific value. Each storage device stores a share and its encrypted key, and if a number of storage devices above a threshold are available, then the shared secret can be reconstructed from the shares and used to decrypt the encrypted keys. Otherwise, the secret cannot be reconstructed if less than the threshold number of storage devices are accessible, and then data on the storage devices will be unreadable.