ABSTRACT:
Data deduplication is one of important data compression techniques for eliminating duplicate copies of repeating data, and has been widely used in cloud storage to reduce the amount of storage space and save bandwidth. To protect the confidentiality of sensitive data while supporting deduplication, the convergent encryption technique has been proposed to encrypt the data before outsourcing. To better protect data security, this paper makes the first attempt to formally address the problem of authorized data deduplication. Different from traditional deduplication systems, the differential privileges of users are further considered in duplicate check besides the data itself. We also present several new deduplication constructions supporting authorized duplicate check in a hybrid cloud architecture. Security analysis demonstrates that our scheme is secure in terms of the definitions specified in the proposed security model. As a proof of concept, we implement a prototype of our proposed authorized duplicate check scheme and conduct test bed experiments using our prototype. We show that our proposed authorized duplicate check scheme incurs minimal overhead compared to normal operations.
INTRODUCTION
Cloud computing provides seemingly unlimited “virtualized” resources to users as services across the whole Internet, while hiding platform and implementation details. Today’s cloud service providers offer both highly vailable storage and massively parallel computing resourcesat relatively low costs. As cloud computing becomes prevalent, an increasing amount of data is being stored in the cloud and shared by users with specified privileges, which define the access rights of the stored data. One critical challenge of cloud storage services is the management of the ever-increasing volume of data. To make data management scalable in cloud computing, deduplication has been a well-known technique and has attracted more and more attention recently. Data deduplication is a specialized data compression technique for eliminating duplicate copies of repeating data in storage.
The technique is used to improve storage utilization and can also be applied to network data transfers to reduce the number of bytes that must be sent. Instead of keeping multiple data copies with the same content, deduplication eliminates redundant data by keeping only one physical copy and referring other redundant data to that copy. Deduplication can take place at either the file level or the block level. For file level deduplication, it eliminates duplicate copies of the same file. Deduplication can also take place at the block level, which eliminates duplicate blocks of data that occur in non-identical files. Although data deduplication brings a lot of benefits, security and privacy concerns arise as users’ sensitive data are susceptible to both insider and outsider attacks. Traditional encryption, while providing data confidentiality, is incompatible with data deduplication. Specifically, traditional encryption requires different users to encrypt their data with their own keys.
Thus, identical data copies of different users will lead to different ciphertexts, making deduplication impossible. Convergent encryption has been proposed to enforce data confidentiality while making deduplication feasible. It encrypts decrypts a data copy with a convergent key, which is obtained by computing the cryptographic hash value of the content of the data copy. After key generation and data encryption, users retain the keys and send the ciphertext to the cloud. Since the encryption operation is deterministic and is derived from the data content, identical data copies will generate the same convergent key and hence the same ciphertext. To prevent unauthorized access, a secure proof of ownership protocol is also needed to provide the proof that the user indeed ownsthe same file when a duplicate is found. After the proof, subsequent users with the same file will be provided a pointer from the server without needing to upload the same file. A user can download the encrypted file with the pointer from the server, which can only be decryptedby the corresponding data owners with their convergent keys.
Thus, convergent encryption allows the cloud to perform deduplication on the ciphertexts and the proof of ownership prevents the unauthorized user to access the file. However, previous deduplication systems cannot supportdifferential authorization duplicate check, which is importantin many applications. In such an authorized deduplication system, each user is issued a set of privileges during system initialization (in Section 3, we elaborate the definition of a privilege with examples). Each file uploaded to the cloud is also bounded by a set of privileges to specify which kind of users is allowed to perform the duplicate check and access the files. Before
submitting his duplicate check request for some file, the user needs to take this file and his own privileges as inputs.
The user is able to find a duplicate for this file if and only if there is a copy of this file and a matched privilege stored in cloud. For example, in a company, many different privileges will be assigned to employees. In order to save cost and efficiently management, the data will be moved to the storage server provider (SCSP) in the public cloud with specified privileges and the deduplication technique will be applied to store only one copy of the same file. Becase of privacy consideration, some files will be encrypted and allowed the duplicate check by employees with specified privileges to realize the access control. Traditional deduplication systems based on convergent encryption, although providing confidentiality to some extent, do not support the duplicate check with differential privileges. In other words, no differential privileges have been considered in the deduplication based on convergent encryption technique. It seems to be contradicted if we want to realize both deduplication and differential authorizationduplicate check at the same time.