CompWare: A Middleware Support to Provide Fault Tolerant and Secure Cloud Storage

Cloud computing is a technology which has been growing very rapidly since the day of its emergence. One of the vital services that it offers is the data storage. Cloud storage has made it possible for the users to store and get back their data without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. Users are able to store and access the data across the globe irrespective of the place and device used initially. In cloud storage the main concerns are the integrity of the data, and the data being available to the user at all times without any loss. Many of the existing models use cryptographic techniques to secure the data or employ an external auditor to verify the data integrity. Due to the involvement of an external auditor at the storage area itself, the auditor might get access to the data. To ensure the data availability, copies are made over the user’s data and stored. This increases the storage space, which in turn intensifies the overhead. This paper proposes a model that increases the security by using cryptographic techniques and ensures data availability by bringing in a middleware which acts as a recovery component to get back the data in case of a failure. In order to minimize the storage overhead, data is compressed by the middleware. The methods and results show that our model reduces the storage needed from 30 to 80 percent. And it also minimizes the overhead incurred both at the user side and at the provider side.