Enabling Mutual Trust for Cloud Storage Systems Using Cheating detection module

Abstract: Currently, the amount of sensitive data produced by many organizations is out pacing their storage ability. The management of such huge amount of data is quite expensive due to the requirements of high storage capacity and qualified personnel. Storage-as-a-Service (SaaS) offered by cloud service providers (CSPs) is a paid facility that enables organizations to outsource their data to be stored on remote servers. Thus, SaaS reduces the maintenance cost and mitigates the burden of large local data storage at the organization’s end. A data owner pays for a desired level of security and must get some compensation in case of any misbehavior committed by the CSP. On the other hand, the CSP needs a protection from any false accusation that may be claimed by the owner to get illegal compensations. In this paper, a cloud-based storage scheme is proposed that allows the data owner to benefit from the facilities offered by the CSP and enables indirect mutual trust between them. The proposed scheme has two important features: i) It allows the owner to outsource sensitive data to a CSP, and it ensures that only authorized users (i.e., Those who have the right to access the owner’s file) receive the outsourced data i.e. It enforces the access control of the outsourced data can be done by sending a key through email to the registered users and ii) Enables indirect mutual trust between the owner and the CSP using Cheating detection module.

Keywords: Outsourcing data storage, dynamic environment, mutual trust, CSP, Cheating detection module, access