Data chains offer interesting possibilities in the field of data storage in the cloud, for example, to provide information traceability. Now a multidisciplinary team of Chinese and North American researchers has developed a blockchain-based system that enables cloud data auditing to ensure its reliability.
One of the traditional problems of the cloud is that the data stored in the providers’ systems are not entirely reliable, either because they are not updated correctly, because they have been modified without the owner’s knowledge or for other reasons. Therefore, ensuring the reliability of information is one of the challenges that cloud service providers face, and the industry continues to investigate new ways of doing it.
One of the avenues of research involves the use of blockchains to provide reliable traceability of the data, which would assure users that they are accessing up-to-date and truthful information, which has not been modified by third parties without their consent. This is the path followed by an international team of researchers from the University of Nebraska (United States) and the University of Sidian (China), which is based on the use of blockchain.
Its approach is based on creating a blockchain-based remote data auditing system, which would allow the reliability of cloud storage to be verified, guaranteeing users that they always have access to up-to-date and 100% reliable data. So far private auditing methods cannot guarantee this reliability, so other public systems have been introduced, which delegate the verification of the information stored in the cloud to third parties.
But nothing can ensure the absolute neutrality of these external entities, which is why this team of researchers has introduced blockchain technology so that all participants in the exchange of information can know at all times the origin of the data and the interactions those that have been subjected.
Using a common collaborative blockchain-based framework, this scheme provides full transparency for everyone who interacts with the data, whether it’s its owners, cloud providers, or any third party that accesses it or uses it in any way, such as they can be external auditors or partners. Their research shows that, at the security level, data integrity is preserved against different attacks, something that has not been achieved until now in cloud environments. And at the performance level, resources are better used than with current approaches.
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