A Security Protocol for Self-Organizing Data Storage

This paper describes a cryptographic protocol for securing self-organized data storage through periodic verifications. Such verifications are beyond simple integrity checks since peers generate a proof that they still conserve the data they are supposed to be storing. The proposed verification protocol is efficient, deterministic, and scalable and successfully prevents most of the security threats to self-organizing storage verification. In particular, a data owner can prevent data destruction at a specific holder by storing personalized replicas crafted thanks to the use of elliptic curve cryptography. The security of this scheme relies both on the ECDLP intractability assumption and on the difficulty of finding the order of some specific elliptic curve over Zn. Furthermore, the protocol also makes it possible for the data owner to delegate the verification operation to other nodes without revealing any secret information.