Remote data integrity check for remotely acquired and stored stream data

Abstract

Numerous sensors have been deployed to monitor processes or environments in various fields. These sensors produce stream data that are difficult to store in a central storage area owing to network bandwidth constraints and the massive amounts of storage necessary. Thus, it is sometimes efficient to store these data using remote storage services. However, integrity concerns arise when data are stored in remote storage. This paper presents a new integrity check method for remotely acquired and stored stream data. The proposed method uses a secure data acquisition and signature extraction module to produce integrity check metadata for the stream data. To share encryption keys used in signature generation and exchange messages like signatures, the module establishes a secure communication channel with the verifier that checks the integrity of the remote data. The signatures are the metadata of data records, which are used for integrity verification. Signatures for each data record are generated by a chain hash technique, but only some of them are kept in the signature store. The proposed method can successfully detect losses and modifications for remotely acquired and collected stream data.