Mitigating traffic-based side channel attacks in bandwidth-efficient cloud storage

Data deduplication is able to effectively identify and eliminate redundant data and only maintain a single copy of files and chunks. Hence, it is widely used in distributed storage systems and cloud storage to save the users' network bandwidth for uploading files. However, the occurrence of deduplication can be easily identified by monitoring and analyzing network traffic, which leads to the risk of user privacy leakage. An attacker can carry out a very dangerous side channel attack, i.e., learn-The-remaining-information (LRI) attack, to reveal users' privacy information by exploiting the side channel of network traffic in deduplication. Existing work addresses the LRI attack at the cost of the high bandwidth consumption. In order to address this problem, we propose a simple yet effective scheme, called randomized redundant chunk scheme (RRCS), to significantly mitigate the risk of the LRI attack while maintaining the high bandwidth efficiency of deduplication. The idea behind RRCS is to add randomized redundant chunks to mix up the real deduplication states of files used for the LRI attack, which effectively obfuscates the view of the attacker, who attempts to exploit the side channel of network traffic for the LRI attack. Our security analysis shows that RRCS significantly mitigates the risk of the LRI attack. We have implemented the RRCS prototype and evaluated it by using three real-world datasets. Experimental results demonstrate RRCS significantly outperforms existing work in terms of bandwidth efficiency.