An Efficient Integrity Verification and Authentication Scheme over the Remote Data in the Public Clouds for Mobile Users

Abstract

The digitalization of the modern world and its applications seem to be integrated more with the mobile phones than with any other communication devices. Since the mobile phones have become ubiquitous with applications for nearly all users, they have become a preferred choice for uploading the sensitive information to the cloud servers. Though the drive for data storage in cloud servers is implicit due to its pay-per-use policies, the manipulation of the data present in the cloud servers by hackers and hardware failure incidents, as happened in Amazon cloud servers in 2011, necessitates the demand for data verification at regular intervals over the data stored in the remote servers. In this line, modern day researchers have proposed many novel schemes for ensuring the remote data integrity, but they suffer from attacks or overheads due to computation and communication. This research paper provides solutions in three dimensions. Firstly, a novel scheme is introduced to verify the integrity of the data stored in the remote cloud servers in the context of mobile users. The second dimension is that of reducing the computational and communication overheads during the auditing process than the previous works. The third dimension securely authenticates the mobile user during the auditing process and the dynamic data operations such as block modification, insertion, and deletion. Moreover, the proposed protocol is provably secure exhibiting soundness, completeness, and data privacy making it an ideal scheme for implementation in the real-world applications.