skip to main content
research-article

Efficient cooperative backup with decentralized trust management

Published:20 September 2012Publication History
Skip Abstract Section

Abstract

Existing backup systems are unsatisfactory: commercial backup services are reliable but expensive while peer-to-peer systems are cheap but offer limited assurance of data reliability. This article introduces Friendstore, a system that provides inexpensive and reliable backup by giving users the choice to store backup data only on nodes they trust (typically those owned by friends and colleagues). Because it is built on trusted nodes, Friendstore is not burdened by the complexity required to cope with potentially malicious participants. Friendstore only needs to detect and repair accidental data loss and to ensure balanced storage exchange. The disadvantage of using only trusted nodes is that Friendstore cannot achieve perfect storage utilization.

Friendstore is designed for a heterogeneous environment where nodes have very different access link speeds and available disk spaces. To ensure long-term data reliability, a node with limited upload bandwidth refrains from storing more data than its calculated maintainable capacity. A high bandwidth node might be limited by its available disk space. We introduce a simple coding scheme, called XOR(1,2), which doubles a node's ability to store backup information in the same amount of disk space at the cost of doubling the amount of data transferred during restore. Analysis and simulations using long-term node activity traces show that a node can reliably back up tens of gigabytes of data even with low upload bandwidth.

References

  1. Adya, A., Bolosky, W., Castro, M., Cermak, G., Chaiken, R., Douceur, J., Howell, J., Lorch, J., Theimer, M., and Wattenhofer , R. 2002. FARsite: Federated available and reliable storage for incompletely trusted environments. In Proceedings of the 5th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  2. Aiyer, A., Avisi, L., Clement, A., Dahlin, M., Martin, J., and Porth, C. 2005. Bar tolerance for cooperative services. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP). Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  3. Baker, M., Shah, M., Rosenthal, D., Roussopoulos, M., Maniatis, P., Giuli, T. J., and Bungale, P. 2006. A fresh look at the reliability of long-term digital storage. In Proceedings of the SIGOPS European Conference on Computer Systems (Euro-Sys). Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  4. Batten, C., Barr, K., Saraf, A., and Trepetin, S. 2002. pstore: A secure peer-to-peer backup system. Tech. rep. MIT-LCS-TM-632, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  5. Bhagwan, R., Tati, K., Cheng, Y., Savage, S., and Voelker, G. M. 2004. Totalrecall: System support for automated availability management. In Proceedings of the ACM/USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI). Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  6. Blake, C. and Rodrigues, R. 2003. High availability, scalable storage, dynamic peer networks: Pick two. In Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  7. Bolosky, W., Douceur, J., Ely, D., and Theimer, M. 2000. Feasibility of a serverless distributed file system deployed on an existing set of desktop PCs. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems (SIGMETRICS). Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  8. Bowers, K. D., Juels, A., and Oprea, A. 2009a. Hail: A high-availability and integrity layer for cloud storage. In Proceedings of the 16th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS). ACM, New York, NY, 187--198. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  9. Bowers, K. D., Juels, A., and Oprea, A. 2009b. Proofs of retrievability: Theory and implementation. In Proceedings of the ACM Workshop on Cloud Computing Security (CCSW). ACM, New York, NY, 43--54. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  10. Chang, F., Ji, M., Leung, S.-T., Maccormick, J., Perl, S., and Zhang, L. 2002. Myraid: Cost-effective disaster tolerance. In Proceedings of the 1st USENIX Conference on File and STorage Technologies. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  11. Chun, B.-G., Dabek , F., Haeberlen, Sit, E., Weatherspoon, H., Kaashoek, M. F., and Morris, R. 2006. Efficient replica maintenance for distributed storage systems. In Proceedings of the 3rd Symposium on Networked System Design and Implementation (NSDI). Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  12. Cohen, B. 2002. Incentives build robustness in bitTorrent. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Economics of Peer-to-Peer Systems.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  13. Cox, L. P., Murrary, C., and Noble, B. 2002. Pastiche: Making backup cheap and easy. In Proceedings of the 5th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI). Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  14. Cox, L. P. and Noble, B. 2003. Samsara: Honor among thieves in peer-to-peer storage. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP). Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  15. Crashplan. Crashplan: Automatic offsite backup. http://www.crashplan.com//.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  16. Dabek, F., Kaashoek, M. F., Li, J., Morris, R., Robertson, J., and Sit, E. 2004. Designing a DHT for low latency and high throughput. In Proceedings of the 1st ACM Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI). Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  17. Ellison, C., Frantz, B., Lampson, B., Rivest, R., Thomas, B., and Ylonen, T. 1986. Spki certificate theory. Internet RFC 2693 http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/htbin/rfc/rfc2693.html. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  18. Ford, B., Strauss, J., Lesniewski-Laas, C., Rhea, S., Kaashoek, F., and Morris, R. 2006. Persistent personal names for globally connected mobile devices. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI). Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  19. Fu,Y., Chase, J. S., Chun, B., Schwab, S., and Vahdat, A. 2003. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  20. Garriss, S., Kaminsky, M., Fredman, M. J., Karp, B., Mazires, D., and Yu, H. 2006. Re: reliable email. In Proceedings of the 3rd Symposium on Networked System Design and Implementation (NSDI). Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  21. Gibson, G. and Patterson, D. 1993. Designing disk arrays for high data reliability. J. Parallel Distrib. Comput. 17, 1--2, 4--27. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  22. Haeberlen, A., Mislove, A., and Druschel, P. 2005. Glacier: Highly durable, decentralized storage despite massive correlated failures. In Proceedings of the 2nd Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI). Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  23. Hogg, T. and Adamic, L . 2004. Enhancing reputation mechanisms via online social networks. In Proceedings of the 5th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  24. Huang, C., Li, J., and Ross, K. 2007. Can Internet video-on-demand be profitable? In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Data Communications Festival. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  25. Kamvar, S. D., Schlosser, M. T., and Garcia-Molina, H. 2003. The eigentrust algorithm for reputation management in p2p networks. InProceedings of the 12th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW). ACM, New York, NY, 640--651. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  26. Kotla, R., Alvisi, L., and Dahlin, M. 2007. Safestore: A durable and practical storage system. In Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  27. Krohn, M., Freedman, M., and Mazires, D. 2004. On-the-fiy verification of rateless erasure codes for efficient content distribution. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  28. Li, H., Clement, A., Wong, E., Napper, J., Roy, I., Alvisi, L., and Dahlin, M. 2006. BAR gossip. In Proceedings of USENIX Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI). Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  29. Li, J. and Dabek, F. 2006. F2f: reliable storage in open networks. In Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  30. Lillibridge, M., Elnikety, S., Birrel, A., and Burrows, M. 2003. A cooperative Internet backup scheme. In Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  31. Maniatis, P., Roussopoulos, M., Giuli, T., Rosenthal, D. S. H., and Baker, M. 2005. The LOCKSS peer-to-peer digital preservation system. ACM Trans. Comput. Syst. 23. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  32. Marti, S., Ganesan, P., and Garcia-Molina, H. 2004. DHT routing using social links. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS). Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  33. Mislove, A., Gummadi, K. P., and Druschel, P. 2006. Exploiting social networks for Internet search. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  34. Mislove, A., Marcon, M., Gummadi, K. P., Druschel, P., and Bhattacharjee, B. 2007. Measurement and analysis of online social networks. InProceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Internet Measurement (IMC). 29--42. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  35. Muthitacharoen, A., Chen, B., and Mazires, D. 2001. A low-bandwidth network file system. In Proceedings of the 18th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP). Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  36. Ngan, T.-W., Wallach, D., and Druschel, P. 2003. Enforcing fair sharing of peer-to-peer resources. In Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  37. Patterson, D., Gibson, G., and Katz, R. 1988. A case for redundant arrays of inexpensive disks (raid). In Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  38. Pinheiro, E., Weber, W.-D., and Barroso, L. A. 2007. Failure trends in a large disk drive population. In Proceedings of the 5th Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST). Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  39. Plank, J. S., Buchsbaum, A. L., Collins, R. L., and Thomason, M. G. 2005. Small parity-check erasure codes-exploration and observations. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN). Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  40. Popescu, B. C., Crispo, B., and Tanenbaum, A. S. 2004. Safe and private data sharing with turtle: Friends team-up and beat the system. In Proceedings of the 12th Cambridge International Workshop on Security Protocols. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  41. Ramabhadran, S. and Pasquale, J. 2006. Analysis of long-running replicated systems. In Proceedings of the 25th IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  42. Rhea, S., Eaton, P., Geels, D., Weatherspoon, H., Zhao, B., and Kubiatowicz, J. 2003. Pond: The oceanstore prototype. In Proceedings of the USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  43. Rhea, S., Godfrey, B., Karp, B., Kubiatowicz, J., Ratnasamy, S., Shenker, S., Stoica, I., and Yu, H. 2005. OpenDHT: A public DHT service and its uses. InProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Internet Measurement (IMC). Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  44. Rowstron, A. and Druschel, P. 2001a. Pastry: Scalable, distributed object location and routing for large-scale peer-to-peer systems. In Proceedings of the 18th IFIP/ACM International Conference on Distributed Systems Platforms (Middleware). Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  45. Rowstron, A. and Druschel, P. 2001b. Storage management and caching in PAST, a large-scale, persistent peer-to-peer storage utility. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP). Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  46. Sabater, J. and Sierra, C. 2002. Social ReGreT, a reputation model based on social relations. ACM SIGecom ExChanges 3, 1, 44--56. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  47. Schroeder, B. and Gibson, G. 2007. Disk failures in the real world: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean too you? In Proceedings of the 5th Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST). Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  48. So, K. and Sirer, E. G. 2007. Latency and bandwidth-minimizing failure detectors. In Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys). Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  49. Storer, M. W., Greenan, K. M., Miller, E. L., and Voruganti, K. 2007. Potshards: Secure long-term storage without encryption. In Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference. 142--156. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  50. Tati, K. and Voelker, G. 2006. On object maintenance in peer-to-peer systems. In Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Peer-to-peer systems (IPTPS).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  51. Toivonen, R., Onnela, J.-P., Saramäki, J., Hyvönen, J., and Kaski, K. 2006. A model for social networks. Physica: Statis. Mech. Appl. 371, 2, 851--860.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  52. Tran, D. N., Chiang, F., and Li, J. 2008. Friendstore: Cooperative online backup using trusted nodes. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Social Network Systems (SocialNet). Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  53. Yang, M., Chen, H., Zhao, B. Y., Dai, Y., and Zhang, Z. 2004. Deployment of a large-scale peer-to-peer social network. In Proceedings of USENIX WORLDS.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar

Index Terms

  1. Efficient cooperative backup with decentralized trust management

    Recommendations

    Reviews

    Joseph M. Arul

    With an increase in computer technology usage comes an increase in data and the need for secure data storage. Valuable stored data must be kept safe from disk failures, operator mistakes, theft, and even natural disasters. For many organizations, data backup methods remain centralized, expensive, and vulnerable to data loss. This paper presents Friendstore [1], an efficient backup method with decentralized trust management on peer-to-peer backup systems, where the data is stored on close-proximity trusted nodes only. This system is inexpensive, since the storage contract is established with trusted friends through the usage of wide area bandwidth and the disk space available on the helper nodes in real time. The authors propose a new method of using an XOR(1,2) algorithm, which "doubles the amount of backup information stored at a node, at the cost of transferring twice the amount of data during" the restoration procedure. The system consists of a collection of nodes running the same software that fills mainly "two roles: backing up a node's local data and helping others store their backups." Since this system is an online real-time backup system, based on the available space on the neighboring nodes, it consists of four tasks, according to the paper: the storage of local data on remote helpers (backup), periodically checking remote copies of its backup data to see whether the data is intact, creating new copies if the data is not intact (verify and repair), and retrieving the remote backup data following a disk crash (restore). Currently, the system is written in Java for the Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems. In order to prepare files for backup on a remote helper, the owner of the data node splits the files into chunks, compresses the data, encrypts it, and replicates it on different helpers within a local area network. The system was evaluated based on trace-driven simulations using about 21 nodes. The experimental results reveal that the actual utilization of trusted decentralized node space is more than 75 percent. Also, when more bandwidth is available, "coding significantly reduces the amount of disk space each node must contribute" toward backup. Finally, the system can back up about 48GB of data with a bandwidth of about 150kbps for a period of five years, with a less-than-0.15 percent loss of data. It is also noted that, if the bandwidth increases, the storage capacity also increases. Friendstore seems like a viable solution for online, trusted, reliable, real-time, low-bandwidth, high-capacity data backup. Online Computing Reviews Service

    Access critical reviews of Computing literature here

    Become a reviewer for Computing Reviews.

    Comments

    Login options

    Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

    Sign in

    Full Access

    • Published in

      cover image ACM Transactions on Storage
      ACM Transactions on Storage  Volume 8, Issue 3
      September 2012
      67 pages
      ISSN:1553-3077
      EISSN:1553-3093
      DOI:10.1145/2339118
      Issue’s Table of Contents

      Copyright © 2012 ACM

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 20 September 2012
      • Accepted: 1 January 2012
      • Revised: 1 June 2010
      • Received: 1 February 2010
      Published in tos Volume 8, Issue 3

      Permissions

      Request permissions about this article.

      Request Permissions

      Check for updates

      Qualifiers

      • research-article
      • Research
      • Refereed

    PDF Format

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader
    About Cookies On This Site

    We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website.

    Learn more

    Got it!