Secure Mobile Distributed File System (MDFS)

摘要

The goal of this research is to provide a way for frontline troops to securely store and exchange sensitive information on a network of mobile devices with resiliency. The first portion of the thesis is the design of a file system to meet military mission specific security and resiliency requirements. The design integrates advanced concepts including erasure coding, Shamir's threshold based secret sharing algorithm, and symmetric AES cryptography. The resulting system supports two important properties: (1) data can be recovered only if some minimum number of devices are accessible, and (2) sensitive data remains protected even after a small number of devices are compromised. The second part of the thesis is to implement the design on Android mobile devices and demonstrate the system under real world conditions. We implement and demonstrate a functional version of MDFS on Android hardware. Due to the device's limited resources, there are some issues that must be explored before MDFS could be deployed as a viable distributed file system.