Authenticated storage using small trusted hardware

A major security concern with outsourcing data storage to third-party providers is authenticating the integrity and freshness of data. State-of-the-art software-based approaches require clients to main-tain state and cannot immediately detect forking attacks, while ap-proaches that introduce limited trusted hardware (e.g., a monotonic counter) at the storage server achieve low throughput. This pa-per proposes a new design for authenticating data storage using a small piece of high-performance trusted hardware attached to an untrusted server. The proposed design achieves significantly higher throughput than previous designs. The server-side trusted hardware allows clients to authenticate data integrity and freshness without keeping any mutable client-side state. Our design achieves high performance by parallelizing server-side authentication operations and permitting the untrusted server to maintain caches and sched-ule disk writes, while enforcing precise crash recovery and write access control