Decentralized Data Integrity Inspection Offloading in Edge Computing Systems Using Potential Games

Edge storage is becoming an increasingly appealing alternative for data owners (DOs), offering benefits like decreased latency and minimized bandwidth usage compared to traditional cloud storage solutions. Nonetheless, stored data within edge servers (ESs) remains vulnerable to disruptions. Existing data integrity auditing schemes face challenges such as the costs of third-party auditors (TPA), unreliable and delayed audit results, and effective management of data inspection concerning time and energy consumption. To tackle these challenges, we introduce DIVO, a decentralized data inspection approach. DIVO leverages ESs as each others' auditors, removing the necessity for a centralized party, thereby mitigating collision risks and potential biases in audit results. We propose a game-theoretic technique to efficiently manage data inspection and verification offloading to ESs. By formulating the decision-making issue as a strategic game for optimally allocating verification tasks among multiple ESs, we establish the presence of Nash equilibrium and design a strategy to attain it. Through comprehensive security and performance evaluations, DIVO has been shown to operate securely within the random oracle model while delivering notable efficiency improvements over recent methods. Our analysis highlights that DIVO surpasses a wide range of recent approaches in both communication and computation efficiency.