A Blockchain-Based Approach for Secure Data Migration From the Cloud to the Decentralized Storage Systems

Abstract

The use of the Cloud computing has been constantly on the rise. However, there are many challenges associated with the Cloud, such as high bandwidth requirements, data security, vendor lock-in and others. The recent rise of decentralized file systems (DFSs) can help mitigate some of these challenges. However, they have some limitations of their own and the current solutions do not provide any mechanism for implementing access control policies. This becomes a hurdle for migrating sensitive data from the Cloud as the associated authorization policies cannot be migrated to the DFSs. In this paper, the authors address the problem of migrating data, and associated authorization policies, from the Cloud to the DFS. They have applied the approach on the content and policies from an actual Cloud provider and it migrates data from AWS S3 to the IPFS and the resource-based authorization policies specified at AWS are added to a custom blockchain solution. The authors have provided implementation details to justify the practicality of the approach.