An international team of Chinese and North American researchers has developed a new algorithm that promises to improve security efficiency in cloud storage environments. For this, they have built a binary essential derivation tree that minimizes the complexity in the hierarchical structures used to manage access to information.
Symmetric cryptography is one of the ways to protect the confidentiality of outsourced data in cloud storage, a method that requires a hierarchical management system of multiple symmetric keys. To this end, the use of key derivation mechanisms has been considered. Still, the distribution of multiple derived keys has seldom been contemplated, which could minimize the cost of key distribution traffic.
A team of researchers from the Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Huazhong Agricultural University and George Mason University, in Fairfax (USA) have delved into this system to develop a way to optimize the security of data stored in the Cloud. In the article they have published in Soft Computing magazine, they explain that they have studied how to build a binary key derivation tree capable of supporting in-place updates, minimizing the cost of derived key distribution traffic, both in static and dynamic scenarios, to through a minimal set of keys.
Through a new structure of key nodes, they have managed to keep the positions of the nodes unchanged during the key update process and simplify the generation of a minimum set of keys. Using this design, they have developed a basic generation algorithm, which is the basis of the final algorithm. And they detail the required distribution and re-derivation processes that are an essential part of the complete scheme.
Finally, they have evaluated the overall performance consumption of their technology, conducting extensive experiments and theoretical analysis on reducing traffic. Their algorithm is more efficient and practical for cloud storage than other key distribution systems used to secure data stored in the Cloud.
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