Project description: Traditional distributed storage systems behind popular data storage services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, or Microsoft OneDrive require the customers to trust the service providers. This implicit trust assumption turns the service provider into a single point of failure and makes the customers data vulnerable to the ever-increasing risk of data tempering, data loss, data censorship, or privacy breaches (see, for example, [1], [2], [3]). The birth of blockchain (e.g., [4], [5]) as a novel and disruptive distributed ledger technology has enabled trustless storage systems (e.g., Filecoin [6], Storj [7]), which decentralize the task of data storage & retrieval to thousands of untrusted storage nodes. These nodes work together to provide the data storage services to the customers, operating under an incentive mechanism set forth by the blockchain software, which ensures that honest nodes are recognized and rewarded, while malicious or rogue nodes are identified and penalized. There is no longer any single point of failures and no need to trust any parties in the system.
In this project, we will investigate and develop novel algorithms, protocols, and systems that allow decentralized storage systems to work securely and efficiently, including designing new proofs of retrievability, proofs of storage, proofs of replication, and proofs of space and time. All these proof-of-something protocols form the backbone of decentralized storage systems, guaranteeing data availability, integrity, and privacy despite the unavoidable presence of untrusted storage nodes or malicious parties in the system. The communication and computational costs to operate a trustless system are currently very high due to the expensive cryptographic layer imposed on top. Therefore, improving the efficiencies of existing protocols and/or developing better ones is crucial for decentralized storage systems to compete against the traditional ones. We will also explore efficient solutions to enable standard functionalities and convenient services in decentralized storage systems as with the traditional cloud storage systems.
Contact: potential candidates can send their CV and University transcripts as well as any other supporting documents to Dr Son Hoang Dau (Hoang) at sonhoang.dau@rmit.edu.au.
Supervisors: Dr Son Hoang Dau (RMIT University), Prof Zahir Tari (RMIT University) - Research Director of RMIT's CCSRI, Prof Emanuele Viterbo, IEEE Fellow (Monash University)
References
[1] (The Guardian) Dropbox data breach, 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/31/dropbox-hack-passwords-68m-data-breach
[2] (New York Times) Cambridge Analytica and Facebook: The Scandal and the Fallout So Far, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-scandal-fallout.html
[3] (Wired) A New Google+ Blunder Exposed Data From 52.5 Million Users, 2018. https://www.wired.com/story/google-plus-bug-52-million-users-data-exposed/
[4] Satoshi Nakamoto, (Bitcoin whitepaper) Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, 2008. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
[5] Vitalik Buterin, (Ethereum whitepaper), A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform, 2014. https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/
[6] Protocol Labs, (Filecoin whitepaper) Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network, https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf
[7] Storj Labs, Inc., (Storj whitepaper) Storj: A Decentralized Cloud Storage Network Framework, https://www.storj.io/storjv3.pdf