MPoWS: Merged Proof of Ownership and Storage for Block Level Deduplication in Cloud Storage

Abstract

With the rapid increase in amount of data that is being generated everyday, the requirement for cloud storage is also increasing. This fact makes deduplication an immediate necessity in order to achieve efficient utilization of storage on cloud servers. Client side deduplication detection also results in proper utilization of network resources which is considerably more costly than off site storage. But this fact has also lead to rise in spoofing based attacks where identity imitation is used to facilitate either faulty or unauthenticated retrieval of data. Hence the requirement for creation of validation protocols for both the clients and the storage servers in which both the players have to establish their identity. In our work, we have proposed a scheme called Merged Proof of Ownership and Storage (MPoWS) which fulfills the requirement of mutual validation for both clients and storage servers. The scheme works well with block level deduplication where relatively large files have to be uploaded to servers and checked for duplication by using different block tags. The protocol uses a randomized check approach by virtue of which it becomes difficult to predict which particular block will be validated thus ensuring improved security.