A Survey of Remote Data Integrity Checking: Techniques and Verification Structures

Cloud storage offers clients great convenience to relieve them from heavy burden of storage and management, so an increasing number of clients choose to outsource their data to remote cloud providers. However, for clients, this entails a sacrifice of actual control of these files. Remote servers may suffer from disk failure for uncertain reasons or even delete rarely accessed data to sell these storages to other clients. Therefore, there's a great necessity for clients to make sure that their data are well stored in remote servers. Numbers of remote integrity checking (RIC) schemes are proposed to solve issues above, including following up work Provable Data Possession (PDP) and Proofs of Retrievability (PoR), which can be applied in cloud auditing. This paper presents state-of-the-art RIC schemes and makes a classification from the perspective of whether they support dynamic verifications, i.e., whether they can still be used to make verifications after clients modify, insert or delete files. In static verification schemes, we delve into the mechanisms and techniques used for integrity checking. For dynamic ones, we discuss the authentication structures that support dynamic operations. We also present several remarks to guide readers to a wide vision of data checking as conclusions and future work.