Ensuring data integrity in storage

Abstract

Data integrity is a fundamental aspect of storage security and reliability. With the advent of network storage and new technology trends that result in new failure modes for storage, interesting challenges arise in ensuring data integrity. In this paper, we discuss the causes of integrity violations in storage and present a survey of integrity assurance techniques that exist today. We describe several interesting applications of storage integrity checking, apart from security, and discuss the implementation issues associated with techniques. Based on our analysis, we discuss the choices and trade-offs associated with each mechanism. We then identify and formalize a new class of integrity assurance techniques that involve logical redundancy. We describe how logical redundancy can be used in today's systems to perform efficient and seamless integrity assurance.