HASS: Highly Available, Scalable and Secure Distributed Data Storage Systems

Abstract

As computers become pervasive and data size increases dramatically, data management systems' security, scalability and availability features turn into major design issues, especially in distributed computing environments. This paper proposes a highly available, scalable and secure distributed data storage system (HASS) for high performance and secure data management. Distributed and parallel data storage or file systems such as Object-based Storage Devices (OSD) and flexible key distribution schemes such as stateless Identity Based Encryption (IBE) are integrated to achieve scalability in terms of performance and key management. OSD provides high performance parallel I/O whereas IBE eliminates pre-shared secrete/symmetric keys and simplifies key distribution. Data at rest (static) and in transit (dynamic) are protected with different encryption strategies for privacy and integrity. With IBE, public keys are not stored whereas private and session keys are generated dynamically for data in transit protection/encryption. SecretSharing is used for data at rest protection. Replication on OSD sites duplicates data shares for high availability. Overall, the proposed HASS system delivers high performance data management with security, scalability and high availability features.