Paper 2020/840 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2020/840 ↗

Proof of Storage-Time: Efficiently Checking Continuous Data Availability

Giuseppe Ateniese
Long Chen
Mohammad Etemad
Qiang Tang
Abstract

A high-quality outsourced storage service is crucial for many existing applications. For example, hospitals and data centers need to guarantee the availability of their systems to perform routine daily activities. Such a system should protect users against downtime and ensure data availability over time. Continuous data availability is a critical property to measure the quality of an outsourced storage service, which implies that outsourced data is continuously available to the server during the entire storage period. We formally study the Proof of Storage-Time (PoSt), the notion initially proposed in the Filecoin whitepaper, which enables a verifier to audit the continuous data availability of an outsourced storage service. We provide a formal security model of PoSt and generic constructions that are proven secure under our definition. Moreover, our concrete instantiation can yield a PoSt protocol with an extremely efficient verification: a single hash computation to verify a proof of size around 200 bits. This makes our scheme applicable even in the decentralized storage marketplace enabled by blockchain.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Applications
Publication info
Preprint.
History
2020-07-12: last updated
2020-07-12: published
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2020/840
License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2020/840,
      author = {Giuseppe Ateniese and Long Chen and Mohammad Etemad and Qiang Tang},
      title = {Proof of Storage-Time: Efficiently Checking Continuous Data Availability},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2020/840},
      year = {2020},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/840}
}
Note: In order to protect the privacy of readers, this archive does not use cookies or embedded third party content.