Zero knowledge based client side deduplication for encrypted files of secure cloud storage in smart cities

As typical applications in the field of the cloud computing, cloud storage services are popular in the development of smart cities for their low costs and huge storage capacity. Proofs-of-ownership (PoW) is an important cryptographic primitive in cloud storage to ensure that a client holds the whole file rather than part of it in secure client side data deduplication. The previous PoW schemes worked well when the file is in plaintext. However, the privacy of the clients' data may be vulnerable to honest-but-curious attacks. To deal with this issue, the clients tend to encrypt files before outsourcing them to the cloud, which makes the existing PoW schemes inapplicable any more. In this paper, we first propose a secure zero-knowledge based client side deduplication scheme over encrypted files. We prove that the proposed scheme is sound, complete and zero-knowledge. The scheme can achieve a high detection probability of the clients' misbehavior. Then we introduced a proxy re-encryption based key distribution scheme. This scheme ensures that the server knows nothing about the encryption key even though it acts as a proxy to help distributing the file encryption key. It also enables the clients who have gained the ownership of a file to share the file with the encryption key generated without establishing secure channels among them. It is proved that the clients' private key cannot be recovered by the server or clients collusion attacks during the key distribution phase. Our performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme is much more efficient than the existing client side deduplication schemes. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.