Earlier this month T-Mobile Sidekick users experienced an outage that left most of them without access to their personal data. Contacts, calendar entries, photographs and other personal information were stored in Danger service provider, a Microsoft subsidiary. As a result most of users personal data are still inaccessible. Moreover looking recent outages people start worrying about the security of their data stored to the cloud storage.
Earlier this year, in 16th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS ’09), RSA researchers presented a technique called high-availability and integrity layer (HAIL) that provides availability and integrity in the cloud. HAIL extends the basic principles of RAID, using many cloud storage providers, to achieve higher level of typical approaches. HAIL does this by striped the file and keeping additional redundant information across multiple cloud storage providers. Using a earlier techniques created from the RSA labs, Proofs of Retrievability (PORs) like mechanism, HAIL forces each provider to prove the existence and the integrity if the file. In case of an error, client uses the redundant information stored in the provider and other providers to reconstructs the file. A sort description of HAIL can be also found here.
Tags: Cloud storage, Data management, HAIL, RSA
