Secure Textual Data Deduplication Scheme Based on Data Encoding and Compression

Abstract

As the need for storage has grown exponentially in recent years, cloud storage has been providing a solution to this need by providing users expanded capacity and access. Providing adequate security and privacy, and lowering storage costs are some of the key challenges facing this solution. A common practice used by cloud service providers (CSPs)-data deduplication - identifies identical copies of users’ data, and removing all, but one copy to lower required storage overhead. However, this can result in serious privacy concerns. In this paper, we formulate a new secure deduplication scheme for textual data. Our proposed method uses data encoding and compression techniques that not only result in reduce storage space required, but also in saving in required transmission bandwidth. The security of the data against the semi-honest CSP and malicious users is ensured by using Burrows Wheel Transform encoding scheme. The encoded data is further compressed to gain effective savings in terms of storage and reduced size of the data. Data encoding and data compression techniques are combined together to realize secure and efficient data deduplication. Through our scheme, the CSP will not only achieve huge storage space savings through data compression and data deduplication, but can also provide the users a satisfactory level of security for their data in the cloud.