Efficient probabilistic methods for proof of possession in clouds

Abstract

Cloud computing is a new paradigm that has received the considerable attention in theory and practice quite recently. One of the applications of cloud computing is the storage of client’s data on remote servers. While maintaining huge volumes of data, the cloud vendors may be tempted to cheat its clients by removing their data. Thus, to avoid such a situation, many proof of possession methods have been proposed. Usually they utilize complex cryptographic calculation which makes them not applicable to devices with limited resources. This paper proposes two novel methods of light-weight proof of possession. Instead of using the resource consuming cryptographic functions, these methods use only straightforward hash functions. In the first method, the client stores his data on one server in the cloud. The second approach addresses the scenario of data duplication between many independent servers.