Client Side Secure Image Deduplication Using DICE Protocol

With the advent of cloud computing, secured data deduplication has gained a lot of popularity. Many techniques have been proposed in the literature of this ongoing research area. Among these techniques, the Message Locked Encryption (MLE) scheme is often mentioned. Researchers have introduced MLE based protocols which provide secured deduplication of data, where the data is generally in text form. As a result, multimedia data such as images and video, which are larger in size compared to text files, have not been given much attention. Applying secured data deduplication to such data files could significantly reduce the cost and space required for their storage. In this paper we present a secure deduplication scheme for near identical (NI) images using the Dual Integrity Convergent Encryption (DICE) protocol, which is a variant of the MLE based scheme. In the proposed scheme, an image is decomposed into blocks and the DICE protocol is applied on each block separately rather than on the entire image. As a result, the blocks that are common between two or more NI images are stored only once at the cloud. We provide detailed analyses on the theoretical, experimental and security aspects of the proposed scheme.