EPoSt: Practical and Client-Friendly Proof of Storage-Time

Abstract

Data availability is the major concern of outsourced data storage services. While reliability is promoted by many storage providers, it is infeasible for users to verify these claims. Proofs of Storage-Time are proposed to address this issue: they allow a prover to convince a verifier that the prover indeed stores the outsourced data continuously during the whole storage period. These protocols, however, either fail to guarantee the actual duration of data possession, or require the client to perform a computationally expensive storing process for each file, marking them far from being practical. We present <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathsf {ePoSt}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> , the first secure, stateless and efficient Proof of Storage-Time protocol with public verifiability. Not only does it ensure continuous data availability, but it also minimizes the cost of the client, which is crucial for real-world deployment. Specifically, processing a 1GB file for outsourcing, in anticipation for 3 proof/verify interactions, each attesting a period of 1 year at 25 minutes intervals requires only 66.34 minutes. In contrast, state-of-the-art solution requires 51 hours of processing to prepare a file for outsourcing. Proof size and verification remains at a reasonable cost: a proof is of size 48.82KB, and can be verified in 36.05 ms. Furthermore, our solution enjoys public verifiability and remains stateless. The former allows the data owner to outsource the verification process, and the latter allows unlimited number of proofs and verification to be conducted after the file has been stored. These properties make <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathsf {ePoSt}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> particularly suitable for new business models such as decentralised storage networks (e.g., Filecoin).