Provenance based data integrity checking and verification in cloud environments.

Muhammad Imran,Inam Ul Haq,Bilal Jan,Awais Ahmad,Fakhri Alam Khan,Helmut Hlavacs,Yongtang Shi

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0177576

Abstract

Cloud computing is a recent tendency in IT that moves computing and data away from desktop and hand-held devices into large scale processing hubs and data centers respectively. It has been proposed as an effective solution for data outsourcing and on demand computing to control the rising cost of IT setups and management in enterprises. However, with Cloud platforms user’s data is moved into remotely located storages such that users lose control over their data. This unique feature of the Cloud is facing many security and privacy challenges which need to be clearly understood and resolved. One of the important concerns that needs to be addressed is to provide the proof of data integrity, i.e., correctness of the user’s data stored in the Cloud storage. The data in Clouds is physically not accessible to the users. Therefore, a mechanism is required where users can check if the integrity of their valuable data is maintained or compromised. For this purpose some methods are proposed like mirroring, checksumming and using third party auditors amongst others. However, these methods use extra storage space by maintaining multiple copies of data or the presence of a third party verifier is required. In this paper, we address the problem of proving data integrity in Cloud computing by proposing a scheme through which users are able to check the integrity of their data stored in Clouds. In addition, users can track the violation of data integrity if occurred. For this purpose, we utilize a relatively new concept in the Cloud computing called “Data Provenance”. Our scheme is capable to reduce the need of any third party services, additional hardware support and the replication of data items on client side for integrity checking.

Highlights

The rapid and historic advancement in information and communication technologies (ICT) over the past two decades led to the vision that computing will one day become a utility like other traditional utilities, e.g., gas, electricity and water
We discussed the importance of data integrity especially in Cloud computing environments
We identified some issues in the existing approaches which makes them inefficient and economically not feasible in Cloud environments

Summary

Introduction

The rapid and historic advancement in information and communication technologies (ICT) over the past two decades led to the vision that computing will one day become a utility like other traditional utilities, e.g., gas, electricity and water. Data integrity and verification in cloud using provenance envisioned model of computing consists of commodity services Such services are available for delivery to the end users at any time (on-demand) without the necessity of hardware/software infrastructure [1, 2]. In this model users access services and data according to their requirements without any concern to the underlying details like how and from where they are delivered. To make this vision a reality, several distributed computing paradigms like Cluster, Utility and Grid Computing have been established. It is based on the concept of distributed computing like its predecessors, adding many specific characteristics of its own like huge scalability, on-demand model and pay-as-you-go pricing to name a few [3]

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Conclusion