A Secure Cloud Backup System with Assured Deletion and Version Control

Abstract

Cloud storage is an emerging service model that enables individuals and enterprises to outsource the storage of data backups to remote cloud providers at a low cost. However, cloud clients must enforce security guarantees of their outsourced data backups. We present Fade Version, a secure cloud backup system that serves as a security layer on top of today's cloud storage services. Fade Version follows the standard version-controlled backup design, which eliminates the storage of redundant data across different versions of backups. On top of this, Fade Version applies cryptographic protection to data backups. Specifically, it enables fine-grained assured deletion, that is, cloud clients can assuredly delete particular backup versions or files on the cloud and make them permanently inaccessible to anyone, while other versions that share the common data of the deleted versions or files will remain unaffected. We implement a proof-of-concept prototype of Fade Version and conduct empirical evaluation atop Amazon S3. We show that Fade Version only adds minimal performance overhead over a traditional cloud backup service that does not support assured deletion.