Check out the new USENIX Web site. next up previous
Next: Conclusion Up: Related work Previous: Secure file systems

Untrusted servers

One way to recover from a malicious server corrupting the persistent store is to replicate the data on several servers. In the state machine approach [26,44], clients read and write data to each replica. A client can recover a corrupted file by contacting enough replicas. The drawback to this method is that each replica must maintain a complete copy of the data.

Rabin's Information Dispersal Algorithm divides a file into several pieces, one for each replica [39]. While the aggregate space consumed by all the replicas is minimal, the system does not prevent or detect corruption.

Alon et al. describe a storage system resistant to corruption of data by half of the servers [2]. A client can recover from integrity-damaged files as long as a threshold number of servers remain uncorrupted.



2003-01-06