Full integrity and freshness for cloud data

Data outsourcing relieves cloud users of the heavy burden of infrastructure management and maintenance. However, the handover of data control to untrusted cloud servers significantly complicates the security issues. Conventional signature verification widely adopted in cryptographic storage systems only guarantees the integrity of retrieved data, for those rarely or never accessed data, it does not work. This paper integrates proof of storage technique with data dynamics support into cryptographic storage design to provide full integrity for outsourced data. Besides, we provide instantaneously freshness check for retrieved data to defend against potential replay attacks. We achieve these goals by designing flexible block structures and combining broadcast encryption, key regression, Merkle hash tree and proof of storage together to provide a secure storage service for outsourced data. Experimental evaluation of our prototype shows that the cryptographic cost and throughput are reasonable and acceptable. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.