Hyperledger based Verifiable and Secure Cloud Data Deletion

In today's era of diversified computational advancements, cloud computing and its application have become an inevitable part of the industry and academia. Chunks of data are stored and removed everyday from the cloud instances. Any remaining trace of this deleted data may lead to illicit data leakage. Cloud Service Consumers (CSC)/users mostly depend on third-party auditors (TPA)/verification systems for guaranteeing that their data has been completely deleted from the cloud premises once their mutual service tenure ends. In this paper, blockchain technology is used to provide an authentication and verification platform for executing a secured and complete removal of user data from Cloud Service Provider (CSP) premises and providing a proof for the same. The Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) signature scheme has been integrated into the existing hyperledger fabric framework to achieve the required results. A performance analysis based on hyperledger caliper is presented. It manifests a negligible performance overhead of 13% due to the additional ECDSA layer. Additionally, the comparative study shows the benefits of TPA independence, deletion request authentication and user identity management which makes the proposed scheme, a more secure and trustworthy datacenter design option as compared to contemporary solutions.