Dynamic remote data auditing for securing big data storage in cloud computing

Cloud computing has emerged as a new computing paradigm that offers great potential for storing data remotely. Presently, many organizations have reduced the burden of local data storage and maintenance by outsourcing data storage to the cloud. However, integrity and security of the outsourced data continues to be a matter of major concern for data owners due to the lack of control and physical possession over the data. To deal with this problem, researchers have proposed remote data auditing (RDA) techniques. However, the majority of existing RDA techniques is only applicable for static archived data and is not applicable for auditing or dynamically updating the outsourced data. They are also not applicable to big data storage because of the high computational overhead on the auditor. In this paper, we propose an efficient RDA technique based on algebraic signature properties for a cloud storage system that incurs minimum computational and communication costs. We also present the design of a new data structure-Divide and Conquer Table (DCT)—that can efficiently support dynamic data operations such as append, insert, modify, and delete. Our proposed data structure can be applied for large-scale data storage and will incur minimum computational cost. A comparison between our proposed method and other state-of-the-art RDA techniques shows that our method is secure and highly efficient in reducing the computational and communication costs on the server and the auditor. © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.