PlayCloud: A Platform to Experiment with Coding Techniques for Storage in the Cloud

Cloud based storage services are increasingly popular for storing private and enterprise data. Differentiating themselves over a large range of features, storage providers can catter to the needs of any customer. But among the needs they must satisfy, safety from data loss or data corruption is the most important one. While data corruption stemming from faulty hardware or software is usually covered by those services, it is not the case when the erasure is due to malicious activities from the storage provider itself. Therefore the need for anti-tampering countermeasures needs to be addressed for the customer to feel comfortable enough to use the service. In the context of the SafeCloud project, our goal is to provide an extensible platform to implement and evaluate censorship resistant storage systems for long term storage. By combining classical techniques such as erasure coding and data dispersion with more novel ones like data block entanglement, we aim at giving good anti-tampering guarantees for cloud based storage services. In this paper, we will present some of the work that has been done so far to reach this objective, results and future developments.