No Arabic abstract
A distributed storage system (DSS) needs to be efficiently accessible and repairable. Recently, considerable effort has been made towards the latter, while the former is usually not considered, since a trivial solution exists in the form of systematic encoding. However, this is not a viable option when considering storage that has to be secure against eavesdroppers. This work investigates the problem of efficient access to data stored on an DSS under such security constraints. Further, we establish methods to balance the access load, i.e., ensure that each node is accessed equally often. We establish the capacity for the alphabet independent case and give an explicit code construction. For the alphabet-dependent case we give existence results based on a random coding argument.
This paper studies the problem of code symbol availability: a code symbol is said to have $(r, t)$-availability if it can be reconstructed from $t$ disjoint groups of other symbols, each of size at most $r$. For example, $3$-replication supports $(1, 2)$-availability as each symbol can be read from its $t= 2$ other (disjoint) replicas, i.e., $r=1$. However, the rate of replication must vanish like $frac{1}{t+1}$ as the availability increases. This paper shows that it is possible to construct codes that can support a scaling number of parallel reads while keeping the rate to be an arbitrarily high constant. It further shows that this is possible with the minimum distance arbitrarily close to the Singleton bound. This paper also presents a bound demonstrating a trade-off between minimum distance, availability and locality. Our codes match the aforementioned bound and their construction relies on combinatorial objects called resolvable designs. From a practical standpoint, our codes seem useful for distributed storage applications involving hot data, i.e., the information which is frequently accessed by multiple processes in parallel.
This chapter deals with the topic of designing reliable and efficient codes for the storage and retrieval of large quantities of data over storage devices that are prone to failure. For long, the traditional objective has been one of ensuring reliability against data loss while minimizing storage overhead. More recently, a third concern has surfaced, namely of the need to efficiently recover from the failure of a single storage unit, corresponding to recovery from the erasure of a single code symbol. We explain here, how coding theory has evolved to tackle this fresh challenge.
Erasure-correcting codes, that support local repair of codeword symbols, have attracted substantial attention recently for their application in distributed storage systems. This paper investigates a generalization of the usual locally repairable codes. In particular, this paper studies a class of codes with the following property: any small set of codeword symbols can be reconstructed (repaired) from a small number of other symbols. This is referred to as cooperative local repair. The main contribution of this paper is bounds on the trade-off of the minimum distance and the dimension of such codes, as well as explicit constructions of families of codes that enable cooperative local repair. Some other results regarding cooperative local repair are also presented, including an analysis for the well-known Hadamard/Simplex codes.
We study the secrecy of a distributed storage system for passwords. The encoder, Alice, observes a length-n password and describes it using two hints, which she then stores in different locations. The legitimate receiver, Bob, observes both hints. The eavesdropper, Eve, sees only one of the hints; Alice cannot control which. We characterize the largest normalized (by n) exponent that we can guarantee for the number of guesses it takes Eve to guess the password subject to the constraint that either the number of guesses it takes Bob to guess the password or the size of the list that Bob must form to guarantee that it contain the password approach 1 as n tends to infinity.
The secrecy of a distributed-storage system for passwords is studied. The encoder, Alice, observes a length-n password and describes it using two hints, which she stores in different locations. The legitimate receiver, Bob, observes both hints. In one scenario the requirement is that the expected number of guesses it takes Bob to guess the password approach one as n tends to infinity, and in the other that the expected size of the shortest list that Bob must form to guarantee that it contain the password approach one. The eavesdropper, Eve, sees only one of the hints. Assuming that Alice cannot control which hints Eve observes, the largest normalized (by n) exponent that can be guaranteed for the expected number of guesses it takes Eve to guess the password is characterized for each scenario. Key to the proof are new results on Arikans guessing and Bunte and Lapidoths task-encoding problem; in particular, the paper establishes a close relation between the two problems. A rate-distortion version of the model is also discussed, as is a generalization that allows for Alice to produce {delta} (not necessarily two) hints, for Bob to observe { u} (not necessarily two) of the hints, and for Eve to observe {eta} (not necessarily one) of the hints. The generalized model is robust against {delta} - { u} disk failures.