Secure Data Objects Replication in Data Grid

Secret sharing and erasure coding-based approaches have been used in distributed storage systems to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of critical information. To achieve performance goals in data accesses, these data fragmentation approaches can be combined with dynamic replication. In this paper, we consider data partitioning (both secret sharing and erasure coding) and dynamic replication in data grids, in which security and data access performance are critical issues. More specifically, we investigate the problem of optimal allocation of sensitive data objects that are partitioned by using secret sharing scheme or erasure coding scheme and/or replicated. The grid topology we consider consists of two layers. In the upper layer, multiple clusters form a network topology that can be represented by a general graph. The topology within each cluster is represented by a tree graph. We decompose the share replica allocation problem into two subproblems: the optimal intercluster resident set problem (OIRSP) that determines which clusters need share replicas and the optimal intracluster share allocation problem (OISAP) that determines the number of share replicas needed in a cluster and their placements. We develop two heuristic algorithms for the two subproblems. Experimental studies show that the heuristic algorithms achieve good performance in reducing communication cost and are close to optimal solutions.