RAP: RAnsomware Protection Scheme Based on Blockchain

Abstract

Ransomware attacks have caused serious data loss, and a frequent/good backup is the only solution to deal with such risks. Unfortunately, current research of data backup mainly focuses on improving data recovery efficiency, and rarely takes backups confidentiality and service DDoS attacks resistance into consideration, which greatly limits their usability in practice. In this work, we propose a novel data backup scheme called RAP (RAnsomware Protection scheme based on blockchain) to make up for the above deficiencies. Based on the principle of data isolation, we first formally discuss the role of gateways in data backup systems and deploy mechanism on gateways to resist DDoS attacks. RAP employs an optimized all-or-nothing transform (AONT) and offers the scheme for setup, backups upload and data recovery through secure channel. We define and analyze the security of RAP for data confidentiality and DDoS attacks resistance. We instantiate RAP by a consortium blockchain based on Ethereum and evaluate its performance. The running time of each phase in RAP is less than 1 millisecond excluding the$r$ead/$w$rite delay of typic data size and our scheme would be compatible with most existing blockchains, which further demonstrate its practicality and scalability.