Efficient Privacy Preserving and Dynamic Public Auditing for Storage Cloud

In recent years, cloud computing has gained lots of importance and is being used in almost all applications in terms of various services. One of the most widely used service is storage as a service. Even though the stored data can be accessed from anytime and at any place, security of such data remains a prime concern of storage server as well as data owner. It may possible that the stored data can be altered or deleted. Therefore, it is essential to verify the correctness of data (auditing) and an agent termed as Third Party Auditor (TPA) can be utilised to do so. Existing auditing approaches have their own strengths and weakness. Hence, it is essential to propose auditing scheme which eliminates limitations of existing auditing mechanisms. Here we are proposing public auditing scheme which supports data dynamics as well as preserves privacy. Data owner, TPA, and cloud server are integral part of any auditing mechanism. Data in the form of various blocks are encoded, hashed, concatenated and then signature is calculated on it. This scheme also supports data dynamics in terms of addition, modification and deletion of data. TPA reads encoded data from cloud server and perform hashing, merging and signature calculation for checking correctness of data. In this paper, we have proposed efficient privacy preserving and dynamic public auditing by utilizing Merkle Hash Tree (MHT) for indexing of encoded data. It allows updating of data dynamically while preserving data integrity. It supports data dynamics operations like insert, modify and deletion. Several users can request for storage correctness simultaneously and it will be efficiently handled in the proposed scheme. It also minimizes the communication and computing cost. The proposed auditing scheme is experimented and results are evaluated considering various block size and file size parameters.