Public auditing for shared data with efficient user revocation in the cloud

With data services in the cloud, users can easily modify and share data as a group. To ensure data integrity can be audited publicly, users need to compute signatures on all the blocks in shared data. Different blocks are signed by different users due to data modifications performed by different users. For security reasons, once a user is revoked from the group, the blocks, which were previously signed by this revoked user must be re-signed by an existing user. The straightforward method, which allows an existing user to download the corresponding part of shared data and re-sign it during user revocation, is inefficient due to the large size of shared data in the cloud. In this paper, we propose a novel public auditing mechanism for the integrity of shared data with efficient user revocation in mind. By utilizing proxy re-signatures, we allow the cloud to re-sign blocks on behalf of existing users during user revocation, so that existing users do not need to download and re-sign blocks by themselves. In addition, a public verifier is always able to audit the integrity of shared data without retrieving the entire data from the cloud, even if some part of shared data has been re-signed by the cloud. Experimental results show that our mechanism can significantly improve the efficiency of user revocation.