R&D: Improved Proofs of Retrievability and Replication for Data Availability in Cloud Storage

The Computer Journal has published an article written by Wei Guo, State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, 100876,China, and State Key Laboratory of Cryptology, P.O. Box 5159, Beijing, 100878, China, Sujuan Qin, Jun Lu, Fei Gao, Zhengping Jin, and Qiaoyan Wen, State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, 100876, China.

Abstract: “For a high level of data availability and reliability, a common strategy for cloud service providers is to rely on replication, i.e. storing several replicas onto different servers. To provide cloud users with a strong guarantee that all replicas required by them are actually stored, many multi-replica integrity auditing schemes were proposed. However, most existing solutions are not resource economical since users need to create and upload replicas of their files by themselves. A multi-replica solution called Mirror is presented to overcome the problems, but we find that it is vulnerable to storage saving attack, by which a dishonest provider can considerably save storage costs compared to the costs of storing all the replicas honestly—while still can pass any challenge successfully. In addition, we also find that Mirror is easily subject to substitution attack and forgery attack, which pose new security risks for cloud users. To address the problems, we propose some simple yet effective countermeasures and an improved proofs of retrievability and replication scheme, which can resist the aforesaid attacks and maintain the advantages of Mirror, such as economical bandwidth and efficient verification. Experimental results show that our scheme exhibits comparable performance with Mirror while achieving high security.“