Towards Immutability: A Secure and Efficient Auditing Framework for Cloud Supporting Data Integrity and File Version Control

TL;DR

This paper introduces Entangled Merkle Forest, a novel, efficient, and cost-effective cloud auditing framework that combines Merkle trees with blockchain features to ensure data integrity and version control in centralized cloud environments.

Contribution

It presents the first node sharing Merkle Forest architecture that offers blockchain-like immutability and dynamic auditing with reduced synchronization and communication overhead.

Findings

Outperforms blockchain-based schemes in time and storage efficiency.

Supports version control and dynamic auditing in centralized cloud environments.

Reduces maintenance costs for cloud service providers.

Abstract

Although wide-scale integration of cloud services with myriad applications increases quality of services (QoS) for enterprise users, verifying the existence and manipulation of stored cloud information remains an open research problem. Decentralized blockchain-based solutions are becoming more appealing for cloud auditing environments because of the immutable nature of blockchain. However, the decentralized structure of blockchain results in considerable synchronization and communication overhead, which increases maintenance costs for cloud service providers (CSP). This paper proposes a Merkle Hash Tree based architecture named Entangled Merkle Forest to support version control and dynamic auditing of information in centralized cloud environments. We utilized a semi-trusted third-party auditor to conduct the auditing tasks with minimal privacy-preserving file metadata. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to design a node sharing Merkle Forest to offer a cost-effective auditing framework for centralized cloud infrastructures while achieving the immutable feature of blockchain, mitigating the synchronization and performance challenges of the decentralized architectures. Our proposed scheme outperforms it's equivalent Blockchain-based schemes by ensuring time and storage efficiency with minimum overhead as evidenced by performance analysis.