Sharing Proofs of Retrievability across Tenants

Abstract

Proofs of Retrievability (POR) are cryptographic proofs which provide assurance to a single tenant (who creates tags using his secret material) that his files can be retrieved in their entirety. However, POR schemes completely ignore storage-efficiency concepts, such as multi-tenancy and data deduplication, which are being widely utilized by existing cloud storage providers. Namely, in deduplicated storage systems, existing POR schemes would incur an additional overhead for storing tenants' tags which grows linearly with the number of users deduplicating the same file. This overhead clearly reduces the (economic) incentives of cloud providers to integrate existing POR/PDP solutions in their offerings. In this paper, we propose a novel storage-efficient POR, dubbed SPORT, which transparently supports multi-tenancy and data deduplication. More specifically, SPORT enables tenants to securely share the same POR tags in order to verify the integrity of their deduplicated files. By doing so, SPORT considerably reduces the storage overhead borne by cloud providers when storing the tags of different tenants deduplicating the same content. We show that SPORT resists against malicious tenants/cloud providers (and against collusion among a subset of the tenants and the cloud). Finally, we implement a prototype based on SPORT, and evaluate its performance in a realistic cloud setting. Our evaluation results show that our proposal incurs tolerable computational overhead on the tenants and the cloud provider.