Abstract
With the rapid development of mobile applications and the Internet of Things (IoT), a massive amount of data is being generated. Cloud platforms enable the management and processing of this data using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet. However, for cloud solutions, often an untrusted centralized authority manages the user´s confidential data, thus causing a lack of transparency and trust. In recent years, distributed storage systems have emerged due to the popularity of decentralized web and blockchain applications. In distributed storage systems, an uploaded file is split into chunks and spread across a network of peers cooperating to act as a single storage system, which requires efficient mechanisms for ensuring correct operation. Since distributed storage systems use a diverse pool of independent, untrusted, and heterogeneous peers, they face various challenges, including data security, integrity, and availability. Moreover, an efficient task scheduler is also required to find the most suitable storage nodes in the network for storing the data chunks. Therefore, distributed storage systems have not yet exhibited their feasibility as substitutes for traditional centralized storage platforms. This study presents BE-DSN, a novel distributed storage network employing the hybrid encoding and replication network (HBERN) for improving file availability and the dynamic key management and distributed encryption network (DKMEN) for multilayered data security and integrity persistence. BE-DSN also leverages blockchain technology to implement on-chain metadata storage using smart contracts. Our system is benchmarked against various storage solutions, including state-of-the-art, indicating superior resilience and performance. At a chunk loss rate of 50%, BE-DSN expresses a probability of data loss around 1%, compared to 16.7% of Snarl, a state-of-the-art system. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of HBERN in improving data availability by ensuring sufficient redundancy in data distribution to recover the original data even in a large-scale chunk loss. Its effective performance places HBERN as a reliable approach, appropriate for environments where node failure is frequent or unpredictable and data availability is critical. The system guarantees data security and integrity by employing DKMEN, a chunk-level multi-layered encryption mechanism where each chunk is encrypted with a unique key, providing high-level protection against security vulnerabilities with efficient key management. Consequently, BE-DSN presents an effective solution to offer resilient distributed data storage, mitigating the key issues of data security, integrity, and availability.