IPANM: Incentive Public Auditing Scheme for Non-Manager Groups in Clouds

Cloud storage services give users a great facility in data management such as data collection, storage and sharing, but also bring some potential security hazards. An utmost importance is how to ensure the integrity of data files stored in the cloud, particular for user groups without trusted managers. Existing literature focuses on integrity checking for groups with managers who have lots of permissions. To overcome the shortage of public auditing for non-manager user groups in clouds, we develop a novel framework IPANM that integrates (t, n) threshold technology, blinding technology, and incentive mechanism to realize an incentive privacy-preserving public auditing scheme. In IPANM, the data integrity is guaranteed by our (t, n) threshold signature based public auditing and the data privacy during public auditing is protected by the blinding technology. The generation of signatures can be accelerated by our blockchain-aided incentive mechanism that mobilizes the initiative of signers in the signature generation by rewarding the contributed signers. We formally prove the security of our IPANM and conduct numerical analysis and evaluation study to validate its high efficiency. The experimental results demonstrate that IPANM has lower overheads of storage, communication, and computation as compared to the state-of-the-art technique IAID-PDP and NPP.