SAFE: A Secure and Efficient Long-Term Distributed Storage System

Secret sharing-based distributed storage systems are one approach to provide long-term protection of data even against quantum computing. Confidentiality is provided because the shares of data are renewed periodically while integrity is provided by commitment schemes. However, this solution is prohibitively costly and impractical: share renewal requires an information-theoretically secure channel between any two nodes and long-term confidential commitment schemes are computationally impractical for large files. In this paper, we present SAFE, a secret sharing-based long-term secure distributed storage system that leverages a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) to overcome the above limitations. Share generation and renewal are performed inside the TEE and the shares are securely distributed to the storage servers. We prototype SAFE protocols using a TEE instantiation, and show their efficiency, even for large files, compared to existing schemes.