An Efficient and Secure Dynamic Auditing Protocol for Data Storage in Cloud Computing

TLDR

Cloud computing hosts data on remote servers, creating security challenges that require independent auditing to ensure data integrity, especially as existing methods only support static archives and cannot handle dynamic updates. The authors aim to provide an efficient and secure dynamic auditing protocol that convinces data owners the cloud stores their data correctly. They design a privacy‑preserving auditing framework, extend it to support dynamic operations provably secure in the random‑oracle model, and enable batch auditing for multiple owners and clouds without a trusted organizer. Analysis and simulations confirm the protocols are secure and efficient, notably reducing the auditor’s computation cost.

Abstract

In cloud computing, data owners host their data on cloud servers and users (data consumers) can access the data from cloud servers. Due to the data outsourcing, however, this new paradigm of data hosting service also introduces new security challenges, which requires an independent auditing service to check the data integrity in the cloud. Some existing remote integrity checking methods can only serve for static archive data and, thus, cannot be applied to the auditing service since the data in the cloud can be dynamically updated. Thus, an efficient and secure dynamic auditing protocol is desired to convince data owners that the data are correctly stored in the cloud. In this paper, we first design an auditing framework for cloud storage systems and propose an efficient and privacy-preserving auditing protocol. Then, we extend our auditing protocol to support the data dynamic operations, which is efficient and provably secure in the random oracle model. We further extend our auditing protocol to support batch auditing for both multiple owners and multiple clouds, without using any trusted organizer. The analysis and simulation results show that our proposed auditing protocols are secure and efficient, especially it reduce the computation cost of the auditor.