Towards Privacy-assured and Lightweight On-chain Auditing of Decentralized Storage
This work addresses privacy and efficiency challenges for users and developers in the billion-dollar decentralized storage market, offering a novel solution that improves upon prior methods.
The paper tackles the problem of auditing data in decentralized storage networks (DSNs) by addressing privacy and efficiency issues, resulting in a solution that produces 288-byte proofs per audit with constant verification cost and scalability to thousands of users on Ethereum.
How to audit outsourced data in centralized storage like cloud is well-studied, but it is largely under-explored for the rising decentralized storage network (DSN) that bodes well for a billion-dollar market. To realize DSN as a usable service in a truly decentralized manner, the blockchain comes in handy -- to record and verify audit trails in forms of proof of storage, and based on that, to handle fair payments with necessary dispute resolution. Leaving the audit trails on the blockchain offers transparency and fairness, yet it 1) sacrifices privacy, as they may leak information about the data under audit, and 2) overwhelms on-chain resources, as they may be practically large in size and expensive to verify. Prior auditing designs in centralized settings are not directly applicable here. A handful of proposals targeting DSN cannot satisfactorily address these issues either. We present an auditing solution that addresses on-chain privacy and efficiency, from a synergy of homomorphic linear authenticators with polynomial commitments for succinct proofs, and the sigma protocol for provable privacy. The solution results in, per audit, 288-byte proof written to the blockchain, and constant verification cost. It can sustain long-term operation and easily scale to thousands of users on Ethereum.