Efficient integrity verification of replicated data in cloud using homomorphic encryption

The cloud computing is an emerging model in which computing infrastructure resources are provided as a service over the internet. Data owners can outsource their data by remotely storing them in the cloud and enjoy on-demand high quality services from a shared pool of configurable computing resources. However, since data owners and the cloud servers are not in the same trusted domain, the outsourced data may be at risk as the cloud server may no longer be fully trusted. Therefore, data confidentiality, availability and integrity is of critical importance in such a scenario. The data owner encrypts data before storing it on the cloud to ensure data confidentiality. Cloud should let the owners or a trusted third party to check for the integrity of their data storage without demanding a local copy of the data. Owners often replicate their data on the cloud servers across multiple data centers to provide a higher level of scalability, availability, and durability. When the data owners ask the cloud service provider (CSP) to replicate data, they are charged a higher storage fee by the CSP. Therefore, the data owners need to be strongly convinced that the CSP is storing data copies agreed on in the service level contract, and data-updates have been correctly executed on all the remotely stored copies. To deal with such problems, previous multi copy verification schemes either focused on static files or incurred huge update costs in a dynamic file scenario. In this paper, we propose a dynamic multi-replica provable data possession scheme (DMR-PDP) that while maintaining data confidentiality prevents the CSP from cheating, by maintaining fewer copies than paid for and/or tampering data. In addition, we also extend the scheme to support a basic file versioning system where only the difference between the original file and the updated file is propagated rather than the propagation of operations for privacy reasons. DMR-PDP also supports efficient dynamic operations like block modification, insertion and deletion on replicas over the cloud servers. Through security analysis and experimental results, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme is secure and performs better than some other related ideas published recently.