Reliable and Secure Distributed Cloud Data Storage Using Reed-Solomon Codes

Despite the popularity and many advantages of using cloud data storage, there are still major concerns about the data stored in the cloud, such as security, reliability and confidentiality. In this paper, we propose a reliable and secure distributed cloud data storage schema using Reed-Solomon codes. Different from existing approaches to achieving data reliability with redundancy at the server side, our proposed mechanism relies on multiple cloud service providers (CSP), and protects users’ cloud data from the client side. In our approach, we view multiple cloud-based storage services as virtual independent disks for storing redundant data encoded with erasure codes. Since each CSP has no access to a user’s complete data, the data stored in the cloud would not be easily compromised. Furthermore, the failure or disconnection of a CSP will not result in the loss of a user’s data as the missing data pieces can be readily recovered. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we developed a prototype distributed cloud data storage application using three major CSPs. The experimental results show that, besides the reliability and security related benefits of our approach, the application outperforms each individual CSP for uploading and downloading files.