Section: Application Domains

Cloud storage

The team is concerned with several aspect of reliability and security of cloud storage, obtained mainly with tools from coding theory. On the privacy side, we build protocols for so-called Private Information Retrieval which enable a user to query a remote database for an entry, while not revealing his query. For instance, a user could query a service for stock quotes without revealing with company he is interested in. On the availability side, we study protocols for proofs of retrievability, which enable a user to get assurance that a huge file is still available on a remote server, with a low bandwith protocol which does not require to download the whole file. For instance, in a peer-to-peer distributed storage system, where nodes could be rewarded for storing data, they can be audited with proof of retrievability protocols to make sure they indeed hold the data.

We investigate these problems with algebraic coding theory, mainly codes with locality (locally decodable codes, locally recoverable codes, and so on).