Charon: A Secure Cloud-of-Clouds System for Storing and Sharing Big Data

We present Charon , a cloud-backed storage system capable of storing and sharing big data in a secure, reliable, and efficient way using multiple cloud providers and storage repositories to comply with the legal requirements of sensitive personal data. Charon implements three distinguishing features: (1) it does not require trust on any single entity, (2) it does not require any client-managed server, and (3) it efficiently deals with large files over a set of geo-dispersed storage services. Besides that, we developed a novel Byzantine-resilient data-centric leasing protocol to avoid write-write conflicts between clients accessing shared repositories. We evaluate Charon using micro and application-based benchmarks simulating representative workflows from bioinformatics, a prominent big data domain. The results show that our unique design is not only feasible but also presents an end-to-end performance of up to 2.5\times 2.5× better than other cloud-backed solutions.