Reliable verification of distributed encoded data fragments in the cloud

• Published in: Journal of ambient intelligence and humanized computing 2021-10, Vol.12 (10), p.9127-9143
• Main Authors: Chouhan, Vikas, Peddoju, Sateesh K.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Algorithms; Artificial Intelligence; Auditing; Availability; Cloud computing; Computational Intelligence; Data integrity; Data management; Data storage; Energy consumption; Engineering; Fragments; Metadata; Original Research; Reliability; Robotics and Automation; User Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction; Verification
• ISSN: 1868-5137; 1868-5145
• DOI: 10.1007/s12652-020-02610-x

Cloud storage services allow users to remotely store their data in a distributed environment and enjoy the cloud applications ubiquitously. To maximize users’ trust, it also integrates a verification mechanism that guarantees the stored data’s correctness. The storage application fragments the user data and stores them on multiple cloud storage servers. However, it suffers from expensive data aggregation computations while processing verification services, and inevitably poses a data integrity verification challenge. To avoid these expensive computations, we simplify the verification procedure without needing the data aggregation, just by storing the evidence fragments and data fragments across the datacenters. In distributed environments, the storage correctness verification mechanism depends on the availability of storage servers. Therefore, the challenge of proof/evidence availability may arise due to a server failure or data corruption, hence, decreasing the reliability of storage correctness verification. Thus, the problem of proof reliability is introduced over the distributed data. A few techniques proposed in the literature provide the data reliability; however, none of these existing works have considered the proof reliability to the best of our knowledge. To address the new issue of proof reliability, in this paper, we utilize and leverage the Erasure Coding (EC) to propose a reliable storage correctness verification solution that guarantees the retrieval of evidence and minimizes the effect of server failure/unavailability. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves reliability even after the loss of a certain number of fragments, ranging between 2 and 12 depending upon the number of parity fragments used in the EC scheme. Extensive experiments are performed in real-time, and results show that our proposed solution is highly efficient than well-known state-of-the-art verification schemes.