A novel hybrid P2P and cloud storage system for retrievability and privacy enhancement

This paper presents a novel fountain code-based hybrid P2P and cloud storage system. While most cloud storage systems guarantees data retrievability of high level, they may be vulnerable to data privacy since the stored data may be exposed to others by accident or design. On the other hand, P2P storage system keeps any peer from accessing the whole data by dividing the data into small pieces and distributing them to multiple participating peers, but may degrade data retrievability due to unstable peers. The proposed hybrid storage system attempts to enhance data retrievability and privacy by effectively distributing fountain encoded symbols to cloud server system and participating peers. It is demonstrated that the proposed hybrid storage system achieves the desired level of data retrievability with a short upload time, and enhance privacy by preventing others from reading the contents.