Enhancing Data Protection in a Distributed Storage Environment Using Structure-Wise Fragmentation and Dispersal of Encrypted Data

摘要

We present a simple and effective way of fragmentation and dispersal of data encrypted with block ciphers. The method takes into consideration the block structure of the ciphertext, as well as the chaining properties of some of the operation modes. It considerably increases the difficulty of a brute-force search aiming at recovering data from less than the totality of the fragments. It can easily be integrated as an additional step inside known fragmentation techniques (such as Secret Sharing Made Short or AONT-RS) protecting data in a situation of key exposure. Comparative experimental results show clear performance and scalability improvement over relevant works.