Performance and Consistency Improvements of Hash Tree Based Disk Storage Protection

Hash tree based disk storage integrity protection suffers from performance penalty and possible losing of consistency. FI-Tree deploys a fixed-structure tree and applies incremental-hash to tree node updating to solve the difficulties of performance and consistency. The biggest advantage of FI-Tree comes from that: to allow tree nodes to be cached to optimize performance, it can maintain consistency between the tree and the protected data with low cost at the same time. Basing on FI-Tree, TNSD constructs an instance of secure disk. TNSD associates one nonce with each data block to be protected, and applies FI-Tree to ensure the nonce to be un-tampered. In such way, data protection can be fulfilled with resistance against any attacks. Related approaches are elaborated, as well as testing results. Theoretical analysis and experimental simulation show that it is a practical and available way to build secure disk.