## 2 Emerging Solutions in Data Storage
In fact, since it does not substantially affect these times, this solution allows us to state that the processing times required are comparable to those of current cloud solutions, with the added advantage of providing a highly secure post-quantum data infrastructure. As anticipated in the introduction, the innovative technological solution presented here aims to address a series of requirements that neither localized nor decentralized storage can adequately meet. This is done to (i) raise the current level of security and data protection beyond what is offered by existing storage systems, and (ii) conceptually and operationally separate the owner of the information from the manager/holder of the data. Thanks to fragmentation, the data manager, who handles the fragments, does not have the authority that the information owner holds--namely, the digital key required to reassemble the fragments of the original file. Consequently, with this infrastructure, as we will see, the data holder and the information owner are no longer interchangeable. Furthermore, the data, understood as one or more fragments, do not allow access to the information contained in the original file unless the necessary credentials and the digital key of the owner--or those authorized by them--are available. To meet these two cognitive and practical objectives in the realm of information systems, the solution had to address several challenges for which the existing literature either had no answers or provided only partial ones. The first challenge tackled was achieving fine-grained decentralization, at the level of fragments rather than monolithic content. While existing decentralized solutions offer effective ways to distribute content across multiple machines with replication, redundancy, and similar features, our approach simultaneously addresses content security through fragmentation into multiple pieces. However, this introduces several issues, such as determining how many fragments to create, whether to use a fixed or variable number of fragments, how to choose the size of the fragments relative to the original file size or processing time, and how to secure the transmission of fragments across nodes in the network. As described in Section 3, the solution optimizes the number of \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c} \hline
**Cloud Storage Solution** & **Upload Time (s)** & **Download Time (s)** \\ \hline
1 & 7.25 & 7.25 \\ \hline
1 & Google Drive & 7.35 & 7.35 \\ \hline
1 & pCloud & 8.2 & 8.2 \\ \hline
1 & Dropbox & 8.0 & 8.0 \\ \hline
1 & Koofr & 7.7 & 7.7 \\ \hline
1 & Tesorit & 8.33 & 8.33 \\ \hline
1 & Amazon Drive & 9.33 & 9.33 \\ \hline
1 & MEGA & 8.73 & 8.73 \\ \hline
1 & OneDrive & 9.2 & 9.2 \\ \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: A comparison among different cloud solutions with respect to the time of uploads and downloads for a file of 100 MB. fragments to generate and their distribution among the nodes in the infrastructure. The preferred approach involves generating a random number of fragments of random sizes, ensuring that fragmentation produces a different distribution of the same content/file at different times. When it comes to fragment distribution across nodes, a second key aspect is securing the transmission. Although transmission channels are generally considered secure, the solution enhances security by encrypting fragments with a hybrid algorithm. This ensures that each fragment is encrypted differently, so if an attacker manages to decrypt one fragment, they must start over to decrypt another. To further enhance data security and protect the information contained in the original file, the solution also addresses the challenge of distinguishing the data manager/holder (responsible for the fragments) from the information owner (the file owner--ideally temporary and not stored in plaintext for better security policies). This additional aspect pertains to information fusion, or how to prevent a potential attacker from combining fragments to reconstruct the original information.