Imran Muhammad, Hlavacs Helmut, Haq Inam Ul, Jan Bilal, Khan Fakhri Alam, Ahmad Awais
Department of Computer Science, Sarhad University of Science & Information Technology, Peshawar, Pakistan.
Entertainment Computing, Faculty of Computer Science, University of Vienna, Austria.
PLoS One. 2017 May 17;12(5):e0177576. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0177576. eCollection 2017.
Cloud computing is a recent tendency in IT that moves computing and data away from desktop and hand-held devices into large scale processing hubs and data centers respectively. It has been proposed as an effective solution for data outsourcing and on demand computing to control the rising cost of IT setups and management in enterprises. However, with Cloud platforms user's data is moved into remotely located storages such that users lose control over their data. This unique feature of the Cloud is facing many security and privacy challenges which need to be clearly understood and resolved. One of the important concerns that needs to be addressed is to provide the proof of data integrity, i.e., correctness of the user's data stored in the Cloud storage. The data in Clouds is physically not accessible to the users. Therefore, a mechanism is required where users can check if the integrity of their valuable data is maintained or compromised. For this purpose some methods are proposed like mirroring, checksumming and using third party auditors amongst others. However, these methods use extra storage space by maintaining multiple copies of data or the presence of a third party verifier is required. In this paper, we address the problem of proving data integrity in Cloud computing by proposing a scheme through which users are able to check the integrity of their data stored in Clouds. In addition, users can track the violation of data integrity if occurred. For this purpose, we utilize a relatively new concept in the Cloud computing called "Data Provenance". Our scheme is capable to reduce the need of any third party services, additional hardware support and the replication of data items on client side for integrity checking.
云计算是信息技术领域的一种新趋势，它将计算和数据分别从桌面设备和手持设备转移到大规模处理中心和数据中心。它被认为是一种有效的数据外包和按需计算解决方案，可控制企业中不断上升的信息技术设置和管理成本。然而，在云平台中，用户数据被转移到远程存储中，这使得用户失去了对其数据的控制权。云的这一独特特性面临着许多安全和隐私挑战，需要清晰地理解并加以解决。其中一个需要解决的重要问题是提供数据完整性证明，即存储在云存储中的用户数据的正确性。用户无法直接访问云中的数据。因此，需要一种机制，让用户能够检查其宝贵数据的完整性是否得到维护或遭到破坏。为此，人们提出了一些方法，如镜像、校验和以及使用第三方审计等。然而，这些方法通过维护数据的多个副本使用了额外的存储空间，或者需要第三方验证者的存在。在本文中，我们通过提出一种方案来解决云计算中的数据完整性证明问题，通过该方案用户能够检查存储在云中的数据的完整性。此外，如果发生数据完整性违规，用户可以进行追踪。为此，我们利用了云计算中一个相对较新的概念，即“数据溯源”。我们的方案能够减少对任何第三方服务的需求、额外的硬件支持以及在客户端复制数据项以进行完整性检查的需求。
