R&D: Secure and Efficient Ownership Verification for Deduplicated Cloud Computing Systems

Journal of Cloud Computing has published an article written by Jay Dave, Kamalesh Ram R., Pratik Patil, Himanshu Patil, Sarvesh Borole, and Subhrakanta Panda, Department of Computer Science & Information Systems, BITS Pilani, Hyderabad Campus, Hyderabad, India.

Abstract: “Cloud storage services offer a scalable platform to store a large amount of data at a low cost. It attracts a large number of customers to outsource their data to the cloud. To manage the massive growth in the size of outsourced data, cloud service providers employ deduplication, i.e., a technique to reduce space and bandwidth requirements by eliminating the upload and storage of redundant data. However, it poses the following severe security threat: “A malicious user who learns deduplication tag of the file, i.e., a small piece of information, can convince the server to allow access to the entire file”. A proof of ownership (POW) concept was introduced that allows the server to challenge the user to prove that s/he owns the entire file. The existing state-of-the-art POW solutions are either not considering the complete file for determining the proof or not efficient in terms of I/O, communication, and computational overheads on the user. In this paper, we propose a secure and efficient POW scheme. The proposed scheme ensures that the user must possess the complete file to generate ownership proof. In addition, our scheme causes minimal I/O, communication, and computational overhead on the user side. We implement the proposed scheme in a real cloud scenario using Google Firebase cloud services. The performance analysis indicates that our scheme is efficient in terms of I/O, computational, and communication overheads than the existing state-of-the-art solutions.“