A hill cipher-based remote data possession checking in cloud storage

Cloud storage enables users to access their data at any time anywhere. It has the advantages of high scalability, ease of use, cost effectiveness, and so on. However, the server that stores users' data may not be fully trustworthy. When users store their data in cloud storage, they concern much about data intactness. This is the goal of remote data possession checking schemes. This paper proposes a Hill cipher-based remote data possession checking scheme. The main idea of the scheme comes from the homomorphism of Hill cipher, namely the tags computed from plaintext blocks can be used to compare with the tags computed from ciphertext blocks. It has several advantages as follows. First, it is efficient in terms of computation and communication. Second, it allows verification without the need for the challenger to compare against the original data. Third, the scheme only needs to store a small amount of metadata and use only small challenges and responses. Finally, it performs data possession checking at the same time it provides confidentiality of data. The security and performance analysis illustrates that the scheme is feasible and effective. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.