Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2008/114

Scalable and Efficient Provable Data Possession

Giuseppe Ateniese and Roberto Di Pietro and Luigi V. Mancini and Gene Tsudik

Abstract: Storage outsourcing is a rising trend which prompts a number of interesting security issues, many of which have been extensively investigated in the past. However, Provable Data Possession (PDP) is a topic that has only recently appeared in the research literature. The main issue is how to frequently, efficiently and securely verify that a storage server is faithfully storing its client’s (potentially very large) outsourced data. The storage server is assumed to be untrusted in terms of both security and reliability. (In other words, it might maliciously or accidentally erase hosted data; it might also relegate it to slow or off-line storage.) The problem is exacerbated by the client being a small computing device with limited resources. Prior work has addressed this problem using either public key cryptography or requiring the client to outsource its data in encrypted form. In this paper, we construct a highly efficient and provably secure PDP technique based entirely on symmetric key cryptography, while not requiring any bulk encryption. Also, in contrast with its predecessors, our PDP technique allows outsourcing of dynamic data, i.e, it efficiently supports operations, such as block modification, deletion and append.

Category / Keywords: cryptographic protocols

Date: received 14 Mar 2008, last revised 8 Apr 2008

Contact author: dipietro at mat uniroma3 it

Available formats: PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20080408:222657 (All versions of this report)

Discussion forum: Show discussion | Start new discussion