TWC: Small: Coding-based Mechanisms for Building Secure Cloud Storage Systems

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A wide range of cloud services and applications operate on sensitive data such as business, personal, and governmental information. This renders security and privacy as the most critical concerns in the cloud era. The objective of this project is to question the separation approach in the design of security and reliability features of storage systems, and to investigate new, coding-based security mechanisms based on a joint-design principle. The proposed program will result in a myriad of outcomes. The solutions include effective ways of thwarting cyber attacks, ensuring data availability, and establishing trust between the parties of storage architectures. These infrastructures are the backbones of several systems including cloud computing, peer-to-peer, and content delivery networks. The proposed research together with its far-reaching effects ensure the well-being of these critical infrastructures of the nation by increasing their security and resilience - supporting business, consumer, and military applications. The educational plan of the project, capitalizing on the proposed perspective, aims to train students with principles of multiple fields and their interactions, preparing them for leading-edge STEM positions.The main directions of this project include a) designing codeword allocations to resolve data connectivity challenges when system components fail, b) utilizing secret keys stored at clients in encoding to reduce the cost of information theoretic security, c) building data mixtures through interference alignment principle to resolve privacy problems, and d) designing codes to facilitate challenge-based cryptographic protocols for establishing trust mechanisms between providers and clients. Revealing the benefits that can be leveraged from such a coding-based security approach, this research addresses the challenges in identifying appropriate metrics for data availability and security, characterizing fundamental limits based on these models, and constructing schemes that achieve optimal performance. The proposed effort is interdisciplinary in nature, borrowing tools from coding theory, information theory, cryptography, and networking, and will develop new techniques in these fields.