Individuals, corporations, organizations, and even governments now utilize cloud storage for their data. It provides a readily accessible, often distributed, remote, and robust way to stockpile digital resources without having to invest directly in the requisite and often vulnerable hardware nor to find the facilities to house that hardware. Writing in the International Journal of Web and Grid Services, a team from China is developing an improved public auditing protocol for cloud storage integrity checking. This would allow data integrity to be checked on cloud servers in order to ensure no data is lost.
Jindan Zhang and Baocang Wang of the State Key Laboratory of Integrated Service Networks at Xidian University, have shown that it is possible to carry out a software attack on the earlier auditing protocols that makes those approaches wholly vulnerable to malicious third parties. Having thus demonstrated the pitfalls of earlier technology, the team has now developed a much stronger and far less vulnerable protocol.
Given how cloud data storage now underpins much of government and business as well as providing ease of backup and accessibility for millions of individuals as well as websites and other systems, it is critical that public auditing become transparent and viable as well as mostly invulnerable to hackers and other malicious third parties.
Zhang, J. and Wang, B. (2019) ‘An improved public auditing protocol for cloud storage integrity checking’, Int. J. Web and Grid Services, Vol. 15, No. 3, pp.282–303.