Efficient audit service outsourcing for data integrity in clouds

Cloud-based outsourced storage relieves the client's burden for storage management and maintenance by providing a comparably low-cost, scalable, location-independent platform. However, the fact that clients no longer have physical possession of data indicates that they are facing a potentially formidable risk for missing or corrupted data. To avoid the security risks, audit services are critical to ensure the integrity and availability of outsourced data and to achieve digital forensics and credibility on cloud computing. Provable data possession (PDP), which is a cryptographic technique for verifying the integrity of data without retrieving it at an untrusted server, can be used to realize audit services. In this paper, profiting from the interactive zero-knowledge proof system, we address the construction of an interactive PDP protocol to prevent the fraudulence of prover (soundness property) and the leakage of verified data (zero-knowledge property). We prove that our construction holds these properties based on the computation Diffie-Hellman assumption and the rewindable black-box knowledge extractor. We also propose an efficient mechanism with respect to probabilistic queries and periodic verification to reduce the audit costs per verification and implement abnormal detection timely. In addition, we present an efficient method for selecting an optimal parameter value to minimize computational overheads of cloud audit services. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.