Provable Multicopy Dynamic Data Possession in Cloud Computing Systems

Increasingly more and more organizations are opting for outsourcing data to remote cloud service providers (CSPs). Customers can rent the CSPs storage infrastructure to store and retrieve almost unlimited amount of data by paying fees metered in gigabyte/month. For an increased level of scalability, availability, and durability, some customers may want their data to be replicated on multiple servers across multiple data centers. The more copies the CSP is asked to store, the more fees the customers are charged. Therefore, customers need to have a strong guarantee that the CSP is storing all data copies that are agreed upon in the service contract, and all these copies are consistent with the most recent modifications issued by the customers. In this paper, we propose a map-based provable multicopy dynamic data possession (MB-PMDDP) scheme that has the following features: 1) it provides an evidence to the customers that the CSP is not cheating by storing fewer copies; 2) it supports outsourcing of dynamic data, i.e., it supports block-level operations, such as block modification, insertion, deletion, and append; and 3) it allows authorized users to seamlessly access the file copies stored by the CSP. We give a comparative analysis of the proposed MB-PMDDP scheme with a reference model obtained by extending existing provable possession of dynamic single-copy schemes. The theoretical analysis is validated through experimental results on a commercial cloud platform. In addition, we show the security against colluding servers, and discuss how to identify corrupted copies by slightly modifying the proposed scheme.