A distributed scheme for secure data access

With the increasing number of applications and their variety, the need to prevent unauthorized disclosure of data and to ensure data integrity in distributed systems has led to a heavy reliance on encryption. Typically, the encryption process operates at file or directory level and applies indiscriminately one algorithm to all the data in a file. In this paper, a distributed scheme is proposed whereby secrecy is achieved through file data concealment and file location concealment, within a network of nodes. This involves first the division of a file into fragments, which are encrypted by applying different algorithms; second the random distribution of these fragments to connected nodes, third the generation of metadata for reconstructing the original file and its commitment to a physical medium and finally the deletion of both the original file and its metadata from the local node. Access to the metadata is the only way of retrieving the original file. An evaluation of the scheme is presented with some performance results.