Secure and Authenticated Data Storage, Access, and Retrieval
Overview
Cloud storage of information continues to grow in popularity as a way for both corporations and consumers to store large amounts of data. Online storage allows files to be stored on remote or geographically dispersed servers, which not only protects the information in case of disaster or physical damage to an office or home but also allows people who are physically separated to access files.
To trust their cloud storage service, however, a person or business must be able to verify the security of their remotely stored data against corruption caused by a faulty server or a malicious attacker who might try to delete or damage files. Using fundamental computer science structures called hash tables, Roberto Tamassia has developed a way for clients to verify the integrity of their data in the cloud even though a third party controls the administration of the server.
Market Opportunity
A study by Fortune Business Insights suggests that the cloud storage business, already a $49 billion industry in 2019, will grow to $297 billion by the year 2027. The growth of remote work, accelerated by the COVID-19 global pandemic, is one of main drivers of the need to store vast amounts of data on remote servers, as has the overall explosion in the amount of new data created every year. Established technology companies such as Amazon and IBM lead the way in offering enterprise-scale cloud storage. Yet clients have little means to verify the security of their remotely stored information, even if it is stored by a generally respected company. A simple way to authenticate and confirm that dynamic, cloud-stored data has not been corrupted or tampered with will be useful for a wide variety of users.
Innovation and Meaningful Advantages
Tamassia’s invention addresses a fundamental data authentication problem in which a person wants to authenticate data over a dynamic set of data elements that have been stored in a hash table maintained by an untrusted server. Used by numerous applications, hash tables are simple and efficient data structures for answering queries optimally in a relatively short amount of time.
Under Tamassia’s approach, the hash table is augmented with an authentication structure that defines a kind of succinct “fingerprint” that is just a few bytes long but can be used to verify the security of the entire stored set. If it is computed on the correct data, this fingerprint will allow the client to verify that their data has not been tampered with. The system is designed to be secure even in the presence of a malicious server and to work efficiently, using a small amount of data to perform the verification so as not to increase computational burdens. In this way, Tamassia’s technology improves on existing methods to verify widely used hash tables.
Collaboration Opportunity
We are seeking an investment opportunity to further develop this innovative technology.
Principal Investigator
Robert Tamassia, PhD
Plastech Professor of Computer Science
Brown University
Brown Tech ID #1928
Roberto_Tamassia@brown.edu
https://cs.brown.edu/people/faculty/rtamassi/
IP Information
2015-08-04 US9098725B2; published.