Ensuring data integrity in storage

Abstract

Data integrity is a fundamental aspect of storage security and reliability. With the advent of network storage and new technology trends that result in new failure modes for storage, interesting challenges arise in ensuring data integrity. In this paper, we discuss the causes of integrity violations in storage and present a survey of integrity assurance techniques that exist today. We describe several interesting applications of storage integrity checking, apart from security, and discuss the implementation issues associated with techniques. Based on our analysis, we discuss the choices and tradeoffs associated with each mechanism. We then identify and formalize a new class of integrity assurance techniques that involve logical redundancy. We describe how logical redundancy can be used in today's systems to perform efficient and seamless integrity assurance.

DIaaS: Data Integrity as a Service in the Cloud

“…Sivathanu, Wright, and Zadok [14] have presented a review of data integrity mechanisms in generic storage file systems. They are applicable to cloud storage services as well.…”

“…The data integrity problem in the cloud has been studied from a variety of perspectives ranging from storage technologies [14] [16][18] [20][22] to architecture [24][25] to standards [28][30] (see details in Section II). One of the drawbacks of these approaches is that the data integrity problem has been coupled together with other problems and has not received treatment in isolation.…”

An oblique-matrix technique for data integrity assurance

“…If a malicious person inserts the same value into the original and mirrored data, the MT can not detect the integrity violation, and the inserted data is considered as part of the original data. MT can not also detect integrity violation by user errors [4].…”

“…There are several factors that cause unexpected or unauthorized modifications to stored data. This includes hardware or software malfunctions, and malicious intrusions [4]. Data can get corrupted due to hardware or software malfunctions.…”

“…A large class of these attacks are caused by malicious modifications of disk data. Malicious intrusions can cause file system inconsistencies and integrity violation in file data [4]. File system inconsistency can cause data corruption, but generally may not cause security threats; files might become inaccessible.…”