Cloud computing has been envisioned as the de-facto solution to the rising storage costs of IT Enterprises. With the high costs of data storage devices as well as the rapid rate at which data is being generated it proves costly for enterprises or individual users to frequently update their hardware. Apart from reduction in storage costs data outsourcing to the cloud also helps in reducing the maintenance. Cloud storage moves the user’s data to large data centers, which are remotely located, on which user does not have any control. However, this unique feature of the cloud poses many new security challenges which need to be clearly understood and resolved. We provide a scheme which gives a proof of data integrity in the cloud which the customer can employ to check the correctness of his data in the cloud. This proof can be agreed upon by both the cloud and the customer and can be incorporated in the Service level agreement (SLA). Data integrity proofs in cloud storage
As data generation is far outpacing data storage it proves costly for small firms to frequently update their hardware whenever additional data is created. Also maintaining the storages can be a difficult task. It transmitting the file across the network to the client can consume heavy bandwidths. The problem is further complicated by the fact that the owner of the data may be a small device, like a PDA (personal digital assist) or a mobile phone, which have limited CPU power, battery power and communication bandwidth.
One of the important concerns that need to be addressed is to assure the customer of the integrity i.e. correctness of his data in the cloud. As the data is physically not accessible to the user the cloud should provide a way for the user to check if the integrity of his data is maintained or is compromised. In this paper we provide a scheme which gives a proof of data integrity in the cloud which the customer can employ to check the correctness of his data in the cloud. This proof can be agreed upon by both the cloud and the customer and can be incorporated in the Service level agreement (SLA). It is important to note that our proof of data integrity protocol just checks the integrity of data i.e. if the data has been illegally modified or deleted.