Hash Tree Based Integrity Protection Appropriate for Disk

Optimized hash tree based approach is proposed here to provide disk integrity protection with fine performance and consistency. By constructing a hash tree on the protected space and creating hash tree leaf nodes from disk sectors directly, it can provide integrity with characteristics like online checking, any data protection, unified low-level mechanism and resistance against any attacks. To make performance and cost acceptable, it defines hash sub-trees corresponding to the frequently accessed disk regions as hot-access-windows to quicken integrity checking processes. At the same time, its regularity is convenient for maintaining consistency required by disk storage. Related mode and approach are elaborated, as well as testing results. Theoretical analysis and experimental simulation show that it is a practical and available way to protect disk data against tampering.