Enabling Data Dynamic and Indirect Mutual Trust for Cloud Computing Storage Systems

Currently, the amount of sensitive data produced by many organizations is outpacing their storage ability. The management of such huge amount of data is quite expensive due to the requirements of high storage capacity and qualified personnel. Storage-as-a-Service (SaaS) offered by cloud service providers (CSPs) is a paid facility that enables organizations to outsource their data to be stored on remote servers. Thus, SaaS reduces the maintenance cost and mitigates the burden of large local data storage at the organization’s end. A data owner pays for a desired level of security and must get some compensation in case of any misbehavior committed by the CSP. On the other hand, the CSP needs a protection from any false accusation that may be claimed by the owner to get illegal compensations. In this paper, we propose a cloud-based storage scheme that allows the data owner to benefit from the facilities offered by the CSP and enables indirect mutual trust between them. The proposed scheme has four important features: (i) it allows the owner to outsource sensitive data to a CSP, and perform full block-level dynamic operations on the outsourced data, i.e., block modification, insertion, deletion, and append, (ii) it ensures that authorized users (i.e., those who have the right to access the owner’s file) receive the latest version of the outsourced data, (iii) it enables indirect mutual trust between the owner and the CSP, and (iv) it allows the owner to grant or revoke access to the outsourced data. We discuss the security issues of the proposed scheme. Besides, we justify its performance through theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation of storage, communication, and computation overheads.