A secure, privacy-preserving, and cost-efficient decentralized cloud storage framework using blockchain

Abstract

Cloud services benefit countless users worldwide due to notable features, such as on-demand self-service, scalability, easy maintenance, etc. Secure storage and access to data in the cloud is critical. Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM) service, which acts in a centralized way to provide access requests to the authenticated users. Controlled access sometimes fails to preserve the privacy of the sensitive information stored in the cloud due to several reasons, such as insider attacks, breaches of data security, or any other types of unauthorized access. This paper suggests a blockchain-assisted secure storage and access mechanism to secure sensitive data. Here blockchain is used as a trust management entity that verifies the identity of the user. Along with this it issues the Access Control Lists (ACLs) and identity token, and at the same time, it records all the interactions between the users and service providers. Data transmission is transparent since transactions are recorded. Importance is given to user privacy and decryption keys security. Linear(t,n) secret sharing scheme is used for key share generation and distribution. For experimentation, in MetaMask cryptocurrency wallet Goerli test network is used. Results reveal that our model consumes less cost to execute than other existing works. The total execution cost to upload and download a data file is 0.00281392 and 0.02455307 GoerliETH. Where the all verification operations such as identity token, ACL, access_log, and data integrity are executed in Zero gas value. The proposed model maintains a constant gas cost regardless of transaction volume, with costs of 33.04 ETH and 32.24 ETH for data upload and download. Moreover, we present a comparison of execution time performance in three different system configurations.