Ethereum Blockchain-Based Authentication Approach for Data Sharing in Cloud Storage Model

Abstract

The development of the cloud plays a wide role in commencing secured communication among users. However, privacy and managing large databases is a major problem in a cloud model. This affects the data sharing due to a lack of trust amongst the stakeholders. Thus, we proposed a new blockchain-assisted authentication and access control technique to provide reliable data integrity verification between the cloud owners and the requester without relying on end-users. The proposed blockchain-based authentication and access control mechanism effectively increases the throughput and reduces the cost by addressing the issues of failure in the cloud model. This method integrates the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) and Ethereum blockchain for sharing the data effectively between the cloud owner and the requester. This framework distributes the secret key to the requester and the data is encrypted by adapting data policies to attain access controls over data. The keyword search function on ciphertext is executed on the basis of smart contract and Ethereum blockchain. The proposed Blockchain-based access control and authentication mechanism obtained better results with a genuine user detection rate of 95%, maximum search accuracy of 95%, and minimum responsiveness of 2.25 sec for 500 Blockchain size.