A Blockchain-Based Flexible Data Auditing Scheme for the Cloud Service

Nowdays, cloud storage technology has become a hot topic, and an increasing number of users are concerned with the security of their data in the cloud. Many auditing schemes on the cloud are proposed and the introduction of a third-party auditor to assist users in verifying the integrity of cloud data. As a centralized node, the third-party auditor has to communicate with all cloud users and cloud service providers, which becomes the bottleneck of the whole scheme. To solve this problem, we design a blockchain-based flexible cloud data auditing scheme. In our scheme, a decentralized auditing framework is proposed to eliminate the dependency on the third-party auditor, which increases the stability, security and performance of the whole scheme. Since the cloud service provider can automatically generates auditing proofs, our scheme can relieve the communication burdens of the cloud service provider. The proposed scheme also adapts the Merkle Hash tree to improve the verification performance. Security analysis and experiments show that the proposed scheme is secure and has better stability and verification efficiency.