Improving Disk Sector Integrity Using 3-dimension Hashing Scheme

To keep the evidence that a stored hard disk does not modify its content, the intuitive scheme is to calculate a hash value of the data in all the sectors in a specific order. However, since one or more sectors, with some probability, may become a bad sector after some time, this scheme fails to prove the integrity of all other sectors that are still good. In this paper, we suggest a scheme which calculates three hash values for each sector, in a three dimensional manner, such that the integrity proof of a sector depends only on the sectors in any one of the three dimensions, in stead of all sectors in the hard disk. Our analysis shows that this new scheme can greatly reduce the effect of bad sector formation in proving the integrity of the disk sectors.