A Comparative Study of the Secret Sharing Algorithms for Secure Data in the Cloud

Abstract

With advances in the field of cloud computing many computing resources and/or services are being provided to the end user on a pay-as-you-use basis. Data outsourcing is a new paradigm in which a third party provides storage services. This is more cost effective for the user as there is no need of purchasing expensive hardware and software for data storage. The user is also relieved from administrative activities of software upgrades and maintenance. Before data out sourcing can become viable, the data provider needs to guarantee that the data is secure, be able to execute queries on the data, and the results of the queries must also be secure and not visible to the data provider. Data encryption, Homomorphic Encryption, Secret Sharing algorithms and Private Information Retrieval (PIR) are the techniques widely used for secure data outsourcing. CIA (Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability) are the challenging issues associated with data storage management with/without data outsourcing. In this paper the performance of two secret sharing algorithms are compared. The Shamir's secret sharing algorithm and Rabin's Information Dispersal Algorithm (IDA) are implemented in a private cloud setup using the OpenStack Cloud framework.