Towards a theory of data entanglement

  • Authors:
  • James Aspnes;Joan Feigenbaum;Aleksandr Yampolskiy;Sheng Zhong

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, Yale University, New Haven CT 06520, United States;Department of Computer Science, Yale University, New Haven CT 06520, United States;Oracle Corporation, 444 Madison Avenue, Suite 300, New York, NY 10022, United States;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, SUNY Buffalo, Amherst NY 14260, United States

  • Venue:
  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

We give a formal model for systems that store data in entangled form. We propose a new notion of entanglement, called all-or-nothing integrity (AONI) that binds the users' data in a way that makes it hard to corrupt the data of any one user without corrupting the data of all users. AONI can be a useful defense against negligent or dishonest storage providers who might otherwise be tempted to discard documents belonging to users without much clout. We show that, if all users use a fixed standard recovery algorithm, we can implement AONI using a MAC, but, if some of the users adopt instead a non-standard recovery algorithm provided by the dishonest storage provider, AONI can no longer be achieved. However, even for the latter scenario, we describe a simple entangling mechanism that provides AONI for a restricted class of destructive adversaries.