This short note revisits the problem of designing secure minimum storage regenerating (MSR) codes for distributed storage systems. A secure MSR code ensures that a distributed storage system does not reveal the stored information to a passive eavesdropper. The eavesdropper is assumed to have access to the content stored on @math number of storage nodes in the system and the data downloaded during the bandwidth efficient repair of an additional @math number of storage nodes. This note combines the Gabidulin codes based precoding [18] and a new construction of MSR codes (without security requirements) by Ye and Barg [27] in order to obtain secure MSR codes. Such optimal secure MSR codes were previously known in the setting where the eavesdropper was only allowed to observe the repair of @math nodes among a specific subset of @math nodes [7, 18]. The secure coding scheme presented in this note allows the eavesdropper to observe repair of any @math ouf of @math nodes in the system and characterizes the secrecy capacity of linear repairable MSR codes.
@cite_14: Maximum distance separable (MDS) codes are optimal error-correcting codes in the sense that they provide the maximum failure-tolerance for a given number of parity nodes. Suppose that an MDS code with @math information nodes and @math parity nodes is used to encode data in a distributed storage system. It is known that if @math out of the @math nodes are inaccessible and @math surviving (helper) nodes are used to recover the lost data, then we need to download at least @math fraction of the data stored in each of the helper nodes (Dimakis et. al., 2010 and , 2013). If this lower bound is achieved for the repair of any @math erased nodes from any @math helper nodes, we say that the MDS code has the @math -optimal repair property. We study high-rate MDS array codes with the optimal repair property. Explicit constructions of such codes in the literature are only available for the cases where there are at most 3 parity nodes, and these existing constructions can only optimally repair a single node failure by accessing all the surviving nodes. In this paper, given any @math and @math , we present two explicit constructions of MDS array codes with the @math -optimal repair property for all @math and @math simultaneously. Codes in the first family can be constructed over any base field @math as long as @math where @math The encoding, decoding, repair of failed nodes, and update procedures of these codes all have low complexity. Codes in the second family have the optimal access property and can be constructed over any base field @math as long as @math Moreover, both code families have the optimal error resilience capability when repairing failed nodes. We also construct several other related families of MDS codes with the optimal repair property.
In this section we formally define the underlying eavesdropper model and the associated secrecy capacity. We then present a brief description two key components of our secure coding schemes: 1) Gabidulin precoding scheme and 2) a code construction from @cite_14 . We conclude the section with a discussion on the prior work in the area of designing secure coding schemes for distributed storage systems.