DWare: Cost-Efficient Decentralized Storage With Adaptive Middleware

Distributed Outsourced Storage systems, exemplified by the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), offer compelling alternatives to traditional centralized cloud storage by emphasizing resilience and openness. Advancing this paradigm, Decentralized Storage (DS) markets leverage distributed ledgers to facilitate the monetization of outsourced storage. However, these markets often prioritize security over cost-efficiency, leading to high costs in existing DS markets. In our work, we introduce a middleware service, DWare, utilizing trusted hardware to balance security and cost efficiency. DWare offers two key advantages: 1) It enhances storage auditing efficiency by delegating computational tasks and standardizing the batched audit process. This approach offers a more feasible solution for validating outsourced storage with recurring pay-offs. 2) It implements secure and verifiable data deduplication, thereby increasing storage efficiency and reducing operational costs. This step, commonplace in cloud storage services, remains largely unexplored in current DS designs. While DWare could empirically reduce costs to levels near raw storage fees, it entails certain security concessions due to middleware involvement. To address this, we propose a hybrid trust security model, granting data owners the flexibility to adjust the security-cost balance as needed.