Towards Usable Cloud Storage Auditing

Cloud storage security has gained considerable research efforts with the wide adoption of cloud computing. As a security mechanism, researchers have been investigating cloud storage auditing schemes that enable a user to verify whether the cloud keeps the user's outsourced data undamaged. However, existing schemes have usability issues in compatibility with existing real world cloud storage applications, error-tolerance, and efficiency. To mitigate this usability gap, this article proposes a new general cloud storage auditing scheme that is more usable. The proposed scheme uses the idea of integrating linear error correcting codes and linear homomorphic authentication schemes together. This integration uses only one additional block to achieve error tolerance and authentication simultaneously. To demonstrate the power of the general construction, we also propose one detailed scheme based on the proposed general construction using the Reed Solomon code and the universal hash based MAC authentication scheme, both of which are implemented over the computation-efficient Galois field GF(2(8)). We also show that the proposed scheme is secure under the standard definition. Moreover, we implemented and open-sourced the proposed scheme. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme is orders of magnitude more efficient than the state-of-the-art scheme.