A lightweight identity-based provable data possession supporting users’ identity privacy and traceability

Abstract

Cloud storage auditing is considered as a significant service used to verify the integrity of data stored in public cloud. However, most existing auditing protocols suffer form complex certificate management/verification since they rely on expensive Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). On the other hand, most cloud users have constrained computational resources. The few existing ID-based storage auditing protocols in the literature, require resource-constrained users to perform costly operations for generating metadata on file blocks. In this paper, we propose a storage auditing protocol which benefits from ID-based structure and lightweight user computations, simultaneously. Our construction keeps user’s identity private from the server and TPA and also provides traceablity of misbehaving users. Our mechanism is also extended to support batch auditing of multiple tasks in multi-user setting. Performance evaluations demonstrate excellent efficiency of our scheme specially at the user’s side in comparison with the state of the art.