Secure image deduplication through image compression

Abstract

Cloud technology has empowered its users with remarkable expediency in terms of unlimited storage, accessibility, and availability of data. It has also contributed to the tremendous growth of digital data. To encounter this frenziedly growth, data deduplication has become a central approach for Cloud Storage Providers (CSPs) since it allows them to remove the identical data from their storages successfully. Currently, images are among the most common shared types of data found on cloud storages, and they are a good candidate for deduplication. In this paper, a novel compression scheme is proposed that achieves a secure deduplication of images in the cloud storages. Its design consists of embedding a partial encryption and a unique image hashing into the Set Partitioning In Hierarchical Trees (SPIHT) compression algorithm. The partial encryption scheme is meant to ensure the security of the proposed scheme against a semi honest CSP whereas the image hashing scheme is meant for classifying the identical compressed and encrypted images so that deduplication can be performed on them, resulting to a secure deduplication strategy with no extra computational overhead incurred for image encryption, hashing and deduplication. Experimental results and security analysis are provided to validate the stated goals.