A novel protocol for secure data storage in Data Grid environment

The number of Internet connected PCs is projected to reach 1 billion by 2015, which means several PetaFLOPS of computing power and a storage capacity around one Exabyte able to exceed the one provided by any centralized system. But at the same time the amount of memory needs for the Organization is also increasing day by day for its various needs. Tapping this unused PC memory to organization storage is called Data Grid. Data Grid depends on a set of widely distributed and un-trusted storage nodes in Grid environment. Securing the Grid environment presents the distinctive set of challenges. These security challenges must be carefully managed before fully deploying Data Grids in sensitive distributed environments. In this paper we propose a cryptographic protocol able to fulfill the storage security requirements related with Data Grid. The proposed protocol uses three basic mechanisms to accomplish its goal: (a) symmetric cryptography and hashing, (b) an Information Dispersal Algorithm and (c) “Quality of Security” (QoSec) quantitative metric.