An efficient dispersal and encryption scheme for secure distributed information storage

Abstract. Digital information is a critical resource, creating a need for distributed storage systems that provide sufficient data availability and security in the face of failures and malicious attacks. However, the requirements for achieving high availability and security with distributed storage systems usually conflict with each other. This paper proposes a novel data dispersal/encryption scheme improving both the availability and security of distributed storage system by using some important properties of matrices. It also allows complete recovery of original data even though they are partially damaged. Analysis shows it improves the availability about 15 % compared with an efficient existing scheme for both read and write operation, while it allows secure storage simultaneously.