Deduplication is a widely used mechanism in cloud storage systems which can greatly increase efficiency. The basic idea is to remove duplicate stored files, replacing copies with a pointer to a single version. Deduplication can be extremely effective in reducing both storage requirements and bandwidth used for uploading. However, it also introduces severe challenges to security.
There is an inherent conflict between the use of deduplication and the desire of users to encrypt their files prior to uploading. Even if this problem can be solved, client-side deduplication opens up a side channel which can reveal information to an adversary (as shown in 2010 by Harnik et al). This talk will examine some recent proposals for cryptographic protocols for secure deduplication and consider their strengths and weaknesses. It will outline a formal model for cloud storage and show how security notions for deduplication can be captured within this general framework. This is joint work with Frederik Armknecht, Gareth Davies, Kristian Gjøsteen, Håvard Raddum and Mohsen Toorani.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Professor Colin Boyd (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
Colin Boyd is Professor in Information Security at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). He completed a PhD in Mathematics in 1985 at the University of Warwick, UK. After 5 years at British Telecom Research Laboratories, where he first became interested in cryptography and information security, he started an academic career at University of Manchester. In 1995, he emigrated to Australia and spent 18 years at QUT. During this time, he became Research Director at the QUT Information Security Institute. In 2013, he returned to Europe taking up his current position at NTNU. His main research interests are in cryptographic protocols, especially key exchange. According to Google Scholar, his publications have been cited over 10 000 times and he has an h-index of 43. He has supervised 20 successful PhD students as main supervisor. Colin remains an Adjunct Professor at QUT.
This lecture proudly supports Institute for Future Environments research on Embracing the Digital Age.
