27-10-2012, 05:26 PM
DATA INTEGRITY PROOFS IN CLOUD STORAGE
Data Integrity Proofs in Cloud Storage.pdf (Size: 2.76 MB / Downloads: 226)
ABSTRACT
Cloud computing has been envisioned as the de-facto solution to the rising storage costs of IT Enterprises. With the high costs of data storage devices as well as the rapid rate at which data is being generated it proves costly for enterprises or individual users to frequently update their hardware. Apart from reduction in storage costs data outsourcing to the cloud also helps in reducing the maintenance. Cloud storage moves the user’s data to large data centers, which are remotely located, on which user does not have any control. However, this unique feature of the cloud poses many new security challenges which need to be clearly understood and resolved. We provide a scheme which gives a proof of data integrity in the cloud which the customer can employ to check the correctness of his data in the cloud. This proof can be agreed upon by both the cloud and the customer and can be incorporated in the Service level agreement (SLA).
Introduction
Data outsourcing to cloud storage servers is raising trend among many firms and users owing to its economic advantages. This essentially means that the owner (client) of the data moves its data to a third party cloud storage server which is supposed to - presumably for a fee - faithfully store the data with it and provide it back to the owner whenever required.
As data generation is far outpacing data storage it proves costly for small firms to frequently update their hardware whenever additional data is created. Also maintaining the storages can be a difficult task. Storage outsourcing of data to cloud storage helps such firms by reducing the costs of storage, maintenance and personnel. It can also assure a reliable storage of important data by keeping multiple copies of the data thereby reducing the chance of losing data by hardware failures.
Storing of user data in the cloud despite its advantages has many interesting security concerns which need to be extensively investigated for making it a reliable solution to the problem of avoiding local storage of data. In this paper we deal with the problem of implementing a protocol for obtaining a proof of data possession in the cloud sometimes referred to as Proof of Retrievability (POR).This problem tries to obtain and verify a proof that the data that is stored by a user at a remote data storage in the cloud (called cloud storage archives or simply archives) is not modified by the archive and thereby the integrity of the data is assured.
Such verification systems prevent the cloud storage archives from misrepresenting or modifying the data stored at it without the consent of the data owner by using frequent checks on the storage archives. Such checks must allow the data owner to efficiently, frequently, quickly and securely verify that the cloud archive is not cheating the owner. Cheating, in this context, means that the storage archive might delete some of the data or may modify some of the data.
Project Purpose-
Purpose of developing proofs for data possession at untrusted cloud storage servers we are often limited by the resources at the cloud server as well as at the client. Given that the data sizes are large and are stored at remote servers, accessing the entire file can be expensive in I/O costs to the storage server. Also transmitting the file across the network to the client can consume heavy bandwidths. Since growth in storage capacity has far outpaced the growth in data access as well as network bandwidth, accessing and transmitting the entire archive even occasionally greatly limits the scalability of the network resources. Furthermore, the I/O to establish the data proof interferes with the on-demand bandwidth of the server used for normal storage and retrieving purpose.
Project Scope-
Cloud storing its data file F at the client should process it and create suitable meta-data which is used in the later stage of verification the data integrity at the cloud storage. When checking for data integrity the client queries the cloud storage for suitable replies based on which it concludes the integrity of its data stored in the client. our data integrity protocol the verifier needs to store only a single cryptographic key - irrespective of the size of the data file F- and two functions which generate a random sequence. The verifier does not store any data with it. The verifier before storing the file at the archive, preprocesses the file and appends some meta-data to the file and stores at the archive.