Hierarchical remote data possession checking method based on massive cloud files

Cloud storage service enables users to migrate their data and applications to the cloud, which saves the local data maintenance and brings great convenience to the users. But in cloud storage, the storage servers may not be fully trustworthy. How to verify the integrity of cloud data with lower overhead for users has become an increasingly concerned problem. Many remote data integrity protection methods have been proposed, but these methods authenticated cloud files one by one when verifying multiple files. Therefore, the computation and communication overhead are still high. Aiming at this problem, a hierarchical remote data possession checking (hierarchical-remote data possession checking (H-RDPC)) method is proposed, which can provide efficient and secure remote data integrity protection and can support dynamic data operations. This paper gives the algorithm descriptions, security, and false negative rate analysis of H-RDPC. The security analysis and experimental performance evaluation results show that the proposed H-RDPC is efficient and reliable in verifying massive cloud files, and it has 32–81% improvement in performance compared with RDPC. © The Author(s) 2016.