Auditing to keep online storage services honest

Abstract

A growing number of online service providers offer to store customers ' photos, email, le system backups, and other digital assets. Currently, customers cannot make informed decisions about the risk of losing data stored with any particular service provider, reducing their in-centive to rely on these services. We argue that third-party auditing is important in creating an online service-oriented economy, because it allows customers to eval-uate risks, and it increases the efciency of insurance-based risk mitigation. We describe approaches and sys-tem hooks that support both internal and external audit-ing of online storage services, describe motivations for service providers and auditors to adopt these approaches, and list challenges that need to be resolved for such au-diting to become a reality.