Efficient Public Integrity Auditing of Collaboratively Stored Data in Cloud Storage with User Privacy Preservation

Abstract

People can efficiently check the accuracy of data kept in cloud storage using the Provable Information Possession (PDP) approach. This becomes more important when sensitive material is exchanged across numerous users via cloud storage, as maintaining the uploader's anonymity in the eyes of the auditor is crucial. During the auditing procedure, the auditor shouldn't be able to tell who uploaded the data. To address this challenge, numerous PDP schemes have been developed with a focus on preserving user identity privacy. Nonetheless, numerous of these suggested approaches depend on Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) methods, which bring about the substantial challenge of managing certificates. Additionally, data auditors in most of these schemes are saddled with heavy computational costs, resulting in reduced efficiency. To overcome these shortcomings, we introduce an innovative identity-based PDP protocol designed to efficiently audit the integrity of data shared within a group while preserving the uploader's privacy. Leveraging the inherent structural advantages of identity-based cryptographic mechanisms, our PDP scheme mitigates the challenges associated with certificate management. Importantly, our approach diverges from prior works by establishing the relationship between the data and the data uploader during the proof generation phase rather than the integrity auditing phase. In summary, our identity-based PDP protocol offers an elegant solution to the problem of verifying data integrity in a group-shared context while safeguarding the privacy of the data uploader. By sidestepping the complexities of certificate management and optimizing the proof generation process, our scheme enhances the efficiency and security of data auditing in cloud storage scenarios.