Blockchain-based secure data provenance for cloud storage

Abstract

Data provenance, which records the history of the ownership and process of a document during its lifecycle, is essential for the success of cloud storage systems. However, it also inevitably incurs some challenging security and privacy issues. In this paper, to address these challenging issues, we present an efficient and secure data provenance scheme and realize it in a system called ESP. ESP is characterized by employing a blockchain-based provenance record chain and can provide a secure and efficient system for data outsourcing, where the correctness, integrity, and timeliness of provenance records can be ensured. Furthermore, we introduce a concept of window of latching (WoL) to assess the practicality of secure provenance schemes. We analyze the security of ESP and evaluate the performance of ESP via implementation, which shows WoL of ESP is short and demonstrates ESP is secure and practical.