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A framework with data-centric accountability and auditability for cloud storage

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Abstract

The cross-domain characteristic of cloud storage service decides that both users and service providers have limited trust toward each other. Judging from a real-world perspective, both parties may have the motivation to engage in dishonest activity for monetary reasons. Hence, accountability should be seriously treated in designing storage systems with practical security. This paper proposes a general accountable framework for cloud storage in a data-centric manner. We design non-repudiable action records to log all data-related access behavior, and through later auditing to detect possible misbehavior. To resist replay attacks, we adopt signature exchange idea to let both parties verify and maintain different metadata signatures signed by the other party. For potential disputes about data content or access records, we also design arbitration protocol to fairly and efficiently settle the dispute and find out the cheating party. Experimental evaluation of our prototype shows that cryptographic cost, storage overhead and throughput are reasonable and acceptable.

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Notes

  1. “Temporarily agree” means that if a user can only check the integrity for received data and could not perform data freshness check, then he simply keeps the hash of the received data in the record, and relies on the future auditing to check whether the CSP sent a stale version of data at that time. Due to the complexities of cryptographic storage design, there are many ways to perform data freshness check during data access, the specific freshness check policy is dependent on the system design and implementation. This paper focuses on introducing a general accountability framework for cloud storage, so we omit the details of freshness check, readers can refer to post-freshness check policy in [20] or immediate freshness check policy in [22].

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous referees for their reviews and insightful suggestions to improve this paper. This work is partially supported by the National Key \( R \& D\) Program of China (2016YFB0800402) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 61232004. Yan Luo is supported in part by the National Science Foundation of USA (Award Nos. 1547428, 1738965 and 1450996).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Engineering, Wuhan Institute of Technology, Wuhan, China

    Hao Jin

  2. Wuhan National Lab for Optoelectronics, School of Computer Science and Technology, Wuhan Institute of Technology, Wuhan, China

    Ke Zhou

  3. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts, Lowell, MA, USA

    Yan Luo

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  1. Hao Jin
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Correspondence to Hao Jin.

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Jin, H., Zhou, K. & Luo, Y. A framework with data-centric accountability and auditability for cloud storage. J Supercomput 74, 5903–5926 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-018-2504-5

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