Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2008/175

Proofs of Retrievability: Theory and Implementation

Kevin D. Bowers and Ari Juels and Alina Oprea

Abstract: A proof of retrievability (POR) is a compact proof by a file system (prover) to a client (verifier) that a target file $F$ is intact, in the sense that the client can fully recover it. As PORs incur lower communication complexity than transmission of $F$ itself, they are an attractive building block for high-assurance remote storage systems.

In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework for the design of PORs. Our framework improves the previously proposed POR constructions of Juels-Kaliski and Shacham-Waters, and also sheds light on the conceptual limitations of previous theoretical models for PORs. It supports a fully Byzantine adversarial model, carrying only the restriction—fundamental to all PORs—that the adversary’s error rate $\epsilon$ be bounded when the client seeks to extract $F$. Our techniques support efficient protocols across the full possible range of $\epsilon$, up to $\epsilon$ non-negligibly close to 1.

We propose a new variant on the Juels-Kaliski protocol and describe a prototype implementation. We demonstrate practical encoding even for files $F$ whose size exceeds that of client main memory.

Category / Keywords: cryptographic protocols /

Date: received 16 Apr 2008, last revised 23 Feb 2009

Contact author: ajuels at rsa com

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Version: 20090223:144657 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2008/175

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