This short note revisits the problem of designing secure minimum storage regenerating (MSR) codes for distributed storage systems. A secure MSR code ensures that a distributed storage system does not reveal the stored information to a passive eavesdropper. The eavesdropper is assumed to have access to the content stored on @math number of storage nodes in the system and the data downloaded during the bandwidth efficient repair of an additional @math number of storage nodes. This note combines the Gabidulin codes based precoding [18] and a new construction of MSR codes (without security requirements) by Ye and Barg [27] in order to obtain secure MSR codes. Such optimal secure MSR codes were previously known in the setting where the eavesdropper was only allowed to observe the repair of @math nodes among a specific subset of @math nodes [7, 18]. The secure coding scheme presented in this note allows the eavesdropper to observe repair of any @math ouf of @math nodes in the system and characterizes the secrecy capacity of linear repairable MSR codes.
We consider a DSS with @math storage nodes where each node stores @math symbols over a finite field @math . We assume that the DSS employs a coding scheme such that content of any @math out of @math nodes in the system is sufficient to construct the content stored in the remaining @math nodes. Furthermore, we assume that the content of every node in the system can be exactly reconstructed by contacting any @math out of @math remaining nodes and downloading @math symbols (over @math ) from each of the contacted nodes. It follows from the Singleton bound that such a system can store a file with at most @math (independent) symbols (over @math ). In fact, an MDS coding scheme does store a file @math of size @math symbols (over @math ). For such coding schemes, it follows from the work of @cite_5 that Here, we focus on the DSS employing those exact-repairable coding schemes that are both storage and repair-bandwidth efficient, i.e., we have that
@cite_5
2963781977
An @math maximum distance separable (MDS) array code of length @math , dimension @math , and sub-packetization @math is formed of @math matrices over a finite field @math , with every column of the matrix stored on a separate node in the distributed storage system and viewed as a coordinate of the codeword. Repair of a failed node (recovery of one erased column) can be performed by accessing a set of @math surviving (helper) nodes. The code is said to have the optimal access property if the amount of data accessed at each of the helper nodes meets a lower bound on this quantity. For optimal-access MDS codes with @math , the sub-packetization @math satisfies the bound @math . In our previous work (IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 63, no. 4, 2017), for any @math and @math , we presented an explicit construction of optimal-access MDS codes with sub-packetization @math . In this paper, we take up the question of reducing the sub-packetization value @math to make it to approach the lower bound. We construct an explicit family of optimal-access codes with @math , which differs from the optimal value by at most a factor of @math . These codes can be constructed over any finite field @math as long as @math , and afford low-complexity encoding and decoding procedures. We also define a version of the repair problem that bridges the context of regenerating codes and codes with locality constraints (LRC codes), which we call group repair with optimal access . In this variation, we assume that the set of @math nodes is partitioned into @math repair groups of size @math , and require that the amount of accessed data for repair is the smallest possible whenever the @math helper nodes include all the other @math nodes from the same group as the failed node. For this problem, we construct a family of codes with the group optimal access property. These codes can be constructed over any field @math of size @math , and also afford low-complexity encoding and decoding procedures.