Almost Universal Hash Families are also Storage Enforcing

Abstract: We show that every almost universal hash function also has the storage enforcement property. Almost universal hash functions have found numerous applications and we show that this new storage enforcement property allows the application of almost universal hash functions in a wide range of remote verification tasks: (i) Proof of Secure Erasure (where we want to remotely erase and securely update the code of a compromised machine with memory-bounded adversary), (ii) Proof of Ownership (where a storage server wants to check if a client has the data it claims to have before giving access to deduplicated data) and (iii) Data possession (where the client wants to verify whether the remote storage server is storing its data). Specifically, storage enforcement guarantee in the classical data possession problem removes any practical incentive for the storage server to cheat the client by saving on storage space. The proof of our result relies on a natural combination of Kolmogorov Complexity and List Decoding. To the best of our knowledge this is the first work that combines these two techniques. We believe the newly introduced storage enforcement property of almost universal hash functions will open promising avenues of exciting research under memory-bounded (bounded storage) adversary model.