R&D: Secure Clouds-of-Clouds Storage With Space-Efficient Secret Sharing

Journal of Information Security and Applications has published an article written by Ahad Nikniaa, Department of Computer Science, University of Tabriz, Tabriz, Iran, Miguel Correiab, INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal, and Jaber Karimpour, Department of Computer Science, University of Tabriz, Tabriz, Iran.

Abstract: “Cloud storage services are top-rated, but there are often concerns about the security of the files there stored. Clouds-of-clouds or multi-clouds are being explored in order to improve that security. The idea is to store the files in several clouds, ensuring integrity and availability. Confidentiality, however, is obtained by encrypting the files with block ciphers that do not provide provable security. Secret sharing allows distributing files among the clouds providing information-theoretic security/secrecy. However, existing secret sharing schemes are space-inefficient (the size of the shares is much larger than the size of the secret) or purely theoretical. In this paper, we propose the first practical space-efficient secret sharing scheme that provides information-theoretic security, which we denominate PRactical Efficient Secret Sharing (PRESS). Moreover, we present the Secure CloUD storage (SCUD) service, a new cloud-of-clouds storage service that leverages PRESS to provide file confidentiality. Additionally, SCUD provides data integrity and availability, leveraging replication.“