Blockchain Reconstructed Cloud Storage Technology

Due to the rapid development of 5G, Internet of things, AI and other technologies, the number of network devices has increased dramatically. A large number of intelligent devices are distributed in urban transportation, industrial parks, commercial buildings, intelligent houses and other places, and these devices are producing a lot of data all the time. According to the report released by IDC, the annual data generated in the world will grow from 33ZB in 2018 to 175ZB in 2025, and nearly half of the data will be stored in the public cloud environment.

Shortcomings of centralized cloud storage

The purpose of centralized cloud storage is to put the storage resources on the centralized disk array, so that users can easily access data at any time, anywhere, through any device that can be connected to the cloud. However, in this centralized service mode, there are some problems, such as insufficient service stability, high cost of network bandwidth, limited data transmission capacity and so on.

At present, we are familiar with the Internet based on the HTTP protocol, but the development of the Internet to today, HTTP gradually shows its shortcomings. Firstly, the centralization of HTTP is inefficient and costly. Secondly, the centralization limits the growth of HTTP protocol. The existing Internet is a highly centralized network, such as Internet blockade, control, monitoring and so on. All of them originate from the centralization of the Internet, which greatly limits the development of HTTP.

In addition, today’s Internet applications are highly dependent on the Internet backbone, which is subject to many factors, such as war, natural disasters, Internet regulation, centralized server downtime and so on, which may cause Internet applications to interrupt services.

Decentralized Reconstruction of Cloud Storage

The co-construction and sharing of storage resources, open network, is a natural advantage of decentralized storage reconfiguration edge storage. At the same time, it also adapts to the distributed demand of edge storage, and achieves the effect of more distributed nodes and more robust networks.

Decentralized storage stores data in adjacent edge storage devices or data centers, greatly reducing the physical distance between data generation, calculation and storage.

Authmen Decentralized Storage

Different from centralized cloud storage service, decentralized storage migrates data storage from remote cloud server to edge storage device or edge data center, which has lower network communication overhead, interaction delay and bandwidth cost, higher adaptability and scalability.

As a decentralized cloud storage, Authmen is compatible with decentralized storage technologies such as IPFS and P2P infrastructure and DHT technology for fast and robust storage and distribution of data blocks. At the same time, Authmen has made a series of expansion and optimization in intelligent redundancy, structured data support, supervision mechanism, file encryption and authority management.

The architecture of the Authmen system is mainly divided into three layers: the storage layer based on TEE, the index layer and the user layer.

• Storage Layer Based on TEE

The storage layer is responsible for the storage and maintenance of data on the Authmen network, which can store a wide range of data. The data is organized into blocks according to the time sequence and stored on the disk. By creating an index, the performance of transaction data reading can be improved. The storage layer is also responsible for consensus on transactions. Through the pluggable consensus module, users can use different consensus algorithms to achieve higher performance in different application scenarios.

Authmen uses the security and encryption of tee to optimize the node architecture of network transmission and storage layer, verify and protect the whole life cycle of the computer operating environment, and realize the storage, sharing and calculation of multi-party, remote and heterogeneous data on the premise of maintaining data ownership and privacy.

Gossip Protocol is a kind of network protocol with good scalability, fault tolerance, decentralization and final consistency. Authmen uses Gossip Protocol to support the underlying network communication.

Through trusted computing, Authmen enables different TEE protocols to collect the newable state of neighboring nodes, check and record the historical information, and propagate the results among other nodes through Gossip Protocol. And form a reputation network, repeatedly select the “most difficult node to lie” for its repeated function contract. So as to form a robust and efficient running environment and build a blockchain distributed storage security network based on trusted computing.

• Index Layer

The index layer is the index of storage, which holds all kinds of data stored for users. The index layer structures and classifies the data, abstracts the “account” model on the basis of the storage layer, and provides support for users to search and query data more easily. DHT (Distributed Hash Table) is a distributed storage method. The principle of DHT is that each client stores a small part of data and is responsible for the retrieval of a certain area without the need of a server, so as to realize the addressing and retrieval of the whole DHT network.

Authmen refer to the Kademlia protocol of IPFS. In the Authmen network, all the information is stored in the form of hash table entries. These information are scattered on each node, thus forming a huge distributed hash table in the whole network. As long as you know the KEY of the information index, you can query its corresponding value information through Authmen protocol, no matter which node the value information is stored on.

The index layer also has the function of privacy protection. Users can encrypt and save the data. After encryption, the data will be uploaded to the distributed storage network, and then calculated through the privacy computing network. Finally, the output result shows that the data can not be viewed through the index. Only the NFT with the corresponding hash certificate has the right to view. In addition, Authmen will also provide the NFT trading market, so that users can obtain benefits through their own value data.

• User Layer

The user layer is responsible for client connection management, providing users with storage and query interface, so that users have a good experience.

For users, the user layer can bring high-quality decentralized storage service for end users, which is fast, effective and easy to use. Users can store and share files by using Authme. It only needs to store the file in the Authmen network. After the file is hashed and assigned an address, others can request the file through the address.

For developers, Authmen supports writing smart contracts in Turing complete language to support complex decentralized applications. Authmen provides SQL like query language and JDBC and RESTinterfaces. This makes it easy for application developers based on database management systems to switch to application development based on Authmen, which can effectively reduce the development cost.

The Advantages of Authmen

Compared with cloud storage, authmen has the following characteristics and advantages:

1. More secure and reliable. Storage and computing are distributed on nodes all over the world. Compared with the centralized cloud with single digit backup center, the authmen organizational architecture has higher natural disaster tolerance and reliability.
2. More robust privacy protection. The centralized server has the authority to manage the user data, and the data security and privacy are not guaranteed. The authmen cuts the data into several parts and stores them in many nodes that support tee, and encrypts them at chip level to protect the data security and privacy.
3. Faster. Because the network can first select the service closer to the user’s edge, the speed is improved by scaling effect and data fragments (smaller fragments can be saved and retrieved at the same time).
4. Higher availability. The load is distributed to each node, which improves the availability and efficiency of the whole network.
5. The cost is lower. The encryption algorithm of blockchain directly improves the data deduplication rate. At the same time, it can also effectively reduce the data redundancy rate.

With the advent of the era of big data, we have to think about how to deal with the problems of increasing data scale, increasingly strict data response delay, data security and privacy in the future.

Based on the trust cohesion of blockchain, through the innovation and optimization of technology, authmen starts from the decentralized storage scenario, and then realizes a credible, reliable and efficient decentralized cloud storage ecology.