This paper addresses the problem of constructing secure exact-repair regenerating codes at the MSR point for all feasible values of the parameters. The setting involves a passive eavesdropper who is allowed to observe the stored contents of, and the downloads into, an @math -subset of the @math nodes of a distributed storage system (DSS). The objective is to achieve perfect secrecy between the eavesdropped symbols and the file stored on the DSS. Previous secure code constructions (most notably that by ) tackle the problem only for the restricted case wherein the number, @math , of helper nodes aiding in the recovery of a failed node is equal to @math . This paper builds on Rawat's work, by combining Gabidulin pre-coding and an MSR construction by Ye and Barg to prove the achievability of secrecy capacity at the MSR point for all allowed values of @math .
Regenerating codes are a class of recently developed codes for distributed storage that, like Reed-Solomon codes, permit data recovery from any subset of nodes within the -node network. However, regenerating codes possess in addition, the ability to repair a failed node by connecting to an arbitrary subset of nodes. It has been shown that for the case of functional repair, there is a tradeoff between the amount of data stored per node and the bandwidth required to repair a failed node. A special case of functional repair is exact repair where the replacement node is required to store data identical to that in the failed node. Exact repair is of interest as it greatly simplifies system implementation. The first result of this paper is an explicit, exact-repair code for the point on the storage-bandwidth tradeoff corresponding to the minimum possible repair bandwidth, for the case when . This code has a particularly simple graphical description, and most interestingly has the ability to carry out exact repair without any need to perform arithmetic operations. We term this ability of the code to perform repair through mere transfer of data as repair by transfer. The second result of this paper shows that the interior points on the storage-bandwidth tradeoff cannot be achieved under exact repair, thus pointing to the existence of a separate tradeoff under exact repair. Specifically, we identify a set of scenarios which we term as “helper node pooling,” and show that it is the necessity to satisfy such scenarios that overconstrains the system.