AONT-RS: Blending Security and Performance in Dispersed Storage Systems

Dispersing files across multiple sites yields a variety of obvious benefits, such as availability, proximity and reliability. Less obviously, it enables security to be achieved without relying on encryption keys. Standard approaches to dispersal either achieve very high security with correspondingly high computational and storage costs, or low security with lower costs. In this paper, we describe a new dispersal scheme, called AONT-RS, which blends an All-Or-Nothing Transform with Reed-Solomon coding to achieve high security with low computational and storage costs. We evaluate this scheme both theoretically and as implemented with standard open source tools. AONTRS forms the backbone of a commercial dispersed storage system, which we briefly describe and then use as a further experimental testbed. We conclude with details of actual deployments.

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