Cumulus: Blockchain-Enabled Privacy Preserving Data Audit in Cloud
This work addresses data integrity and trust issues in cloud storage for data owners and auditors, but it is incremental as it builds on existing Proof of Retrievability schemes with added adversarial assumptions and blockchain integration.
The paper tackles the problem of ensuring data integrity in cloud storage when any party, including data owners and auditors, may be dishonest or collude, by designing a blockchain-enabled audit protocol that uses smart contracts for dispute mediation and state channels for efficiency, achieving comparable performance to existing schemes.
Data owners upload large files to cloud storage servers, but malicious servers may potentially tamper data. To check integrity of remote data, Proof of Retrievability (PoR) schemes were introduced. Existing PoR protocols assume that data owners and third-party auditors are honest and audit only the potentially malicious cloud server to check integrity of stored data. In this paper we consider a system where any party may attempt to cheat others and consider collusion cases. We design a protocol that is secure under such adversarial assumptions and use blockchain smart contracts to act as mediator in case of dispute and payment settlement. We use state channels to reduce blockchain interactions in order to build a practical audit solution. We implement and evaluate a prototype using Ethereum as the blockchain platform and show that our scheme has comparable performance.