This thesis investigates the role of error-correcting codes in
Distributed and Pervasive Computing. The main results are at the
intersection of Security and Fault Tolerance for these
environments. There are two primary areas that are explored in this
thesis.
1. We have investigated protocols for large scale fault tolerant
secure distributed storage. The two main concerns here are security
and redundancy. In one arm of this research we developed SAFE, a
distributed storage system based on a new protocol that offers a
two-in-one solution to fault-tolerance and confidentiality. This
protocol is based on cryptographic properties of error correction
codes. In another arm, we developed esf, another prototype
distributed persistent storage; esf facilitates seamless hardware
extension of storage units, high resilience to loads and provides
high availability. The main ingredient in its design is a modern
class of erasure codes known as the {em Fountain Codes}. One
problem in such large storage is the heavy overhead of the
associated fingerprints needed for checking data integrity. esf
deploys a clever integrity check mechanism by use of a data
structure known as the {em Merkle Tree} to address this issue.
2. We also investigated the design of a new remote
authentication protocol. Applications over long range wireless would
benefit quite a bit from this design. We designed and implemented
LAWN, a lightweight remote authentication protocol for wireless
networks that deploys a randomized approximation scheme based on
Error correcting codes. We have evaluated in detail the performance
of LAWN; while it adds very low overhead of computation, the savings
in bandwidth and power are quite dramatic.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:GATECH/oai:smartech.gatech.edu:1853/6848 |
| Date | 11 February 2005 |
| Creators | Paul, Arnab |
| Publisher | Georgia Institute of Technology |
| Source Sets | Georgia Tech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Format | 931023 bytes, application/pdf |
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