Efficient Privacy-Preserving Cloud Data Auditing Protocol

Cloud Computing is the paradigm of choice today which allows its users to avail the computing resources, such as storage, database, application development, application deployment, and so on, as a service, on a pay - for - use model, over the Internet. Even though the benefits of Cloud Computing are overwhelming, it also poses several challenges to the data owners, since the data is not stored in the local computers, instead they are stored remotely and managed by the cloud providers. This introduces many security challenges that are unique to this Cloud paradigm. In this paper we propose an efficient, privacy-preserving protocol for verifying the correctness of remotely stored data that uses spot checking, and preserves the Sequentiality property of file access. We also propose an improved scheme which introduces randomness into spot checking, thus preventing the adversaries from anticipating which file blocks will be queried in each challenge.