Secure personal cloud storage

With the consumerization of IT, more and more digital contents such as photos and videos are generated by individual end users. This has driven the growth in portable storage devices (PSD) and increasingly personal cloud storage. PSD, though convenient to use, lacks the ubiquitous access of cloud and is subject to loss and theft. On the other hand, there is an increased risk of cyberattack and data leakage for storing data in the cloud. Most secured cloud storage solutions rely upon encryption as a way to protect the secrecy of data. Advancement in cryptanalysis may render strong encryption today ineffective tomorrow. Long-lived data requires re-encryption to keep pace with progress in cryptanalysis and this may result in over-complex key management issues. In this paper we describe a secure personal cloud storage system that affords the plug-n-play convenience of PSD, and the accessibility and scalability of cloud storage. Our secure mobile personal cloud storage system uses information dispersal algorithm (IDA) to split data into unrecognizable slices and disperse the slices to multitude of storage nodes. An attacker has to successfully compromise a threshold number of slices to derive any useful information from the slices. The system is inherently fault-tolerant and can survive the loss of some slices without impacting the ability to reconstruct.