Provable Multicopy Dynamic Data Possession in Cloud Computing

Increangly more and more organizations are opting for outsourcing data to remote cloud service providers (CSPs). Customers can rent the CSPs storage infrastructure to store and retrieve almost unlimited amount of data by paying fees metered in gigabyte/month. For an increased level of scalability, availability, and durability, some customers may want their data to be replicated on multiple servers across multiple data centers. The more copies the CSP is asked to store, the more fees the customers are charged. Therefore, customers need to have a strong guarantee that the CSP is storing all data copies that are agreed upon in the service contract, and all these copies are consistent with the most recent modifications issued by the customers. In this paper, we propose a map-based Provable multicopy dynamic data possession (MB-PMDDP) scheme that has the following features: 1) it provides an evidence to the customers that the CSP is not cheating by storing fewer copies; 2) it supports outsourcing of dynamic data, i.e., it supports block-level operations, such as block modification, insertion, deletion, and append; and 3) it allows authorized users to seamlessly access the file copies stored by the CSP. We give a comparative analysis of the proposed MB-MDDP scheme with a reference model obtained by extending existing possession of dynamic single-copy schemes. The theoretical analysis is validated through experimental results on a commercial cloud platform. In addition, we show the security against colluding servers, and discuss how to identify corrupted copies by slightly modifying the proposed scheme. a wide range of users, including healthcare providers, family members or friends. Due to the high cost of building and maintaining specialized data centers, many PHR services are outsourced to or provided by third-party service providers, for example, Microsoft HealthVault1. Recently, architectures of storing PHRs in cloud computing have been proposed in. While it is exciting to have convenient PHR services for everyone, there are many security and privacy risk which could impede its wide adoption. The main concern is about whether the patients could actually control the sharing of their sensitive personal health information (PHI), especially when they are stored on a third-party server which people may not fully trust. On the one hand, although there exist healthcare regulations such as HIPAA which is recently amended to incorporate business associates, cloud providers are usually not covered entities. On the other hand, due to the high value of the sensitive personal health information (PHI), the third-party storage servers are often the targets of various malicious behaviors which may lead to exposure of the PHI. As a famous incident, a Department of Veterans Affairs database containing sensitive PHI of 26.5 million military veterans, including their social security numbers and health problems was stolen by an employee who took the data home without authorization. To ensure patient-centric privacy control over their own PHRs, it is essential to have fine-grained data access control mechanisms that work with semi-trusted servers.(1) We propose a novel ABE-based framework for patient-centric secure sharing of PHRs in cloud computing environments, under the multi-owner settings. To address the key management challenges, we conceptually divide the users in the system into two types of domains, namely public and personal domains. In particular, the majority professional users are managed distributively by attribute authorities in the former, while each owner only needs to manage the keys of a small number of users in her personal domain. In this way, our framework can simultaneously handle different types of PHR sharing applications’ requirements, while incurring minimal key management overhead for both owners and users in the system. In addition, the framework enforces write access control, handles dynamic policy updates, and provides break-glass access to PHRs under emergence scenarios. (2) In the public domain, we use multi-authority ABE (MA-ABE) to improve the security and avoid key escrow problem. Each attribute authority (AA) in it governs a disjoint subset of user role attributes, while none of them alone is able to control the security of the whole system. We propose mechanisms for key distribution and encryption so that PHR owners can specify personalized fine-grained role-based access policies during file encryption. In the personal domain, owners directly assign access privileges for personal users and encrypt a PHR file under its data attributes. Furthermore, we enhance MA-ABE by putting forward an efficient and on-demand user/attribute revocation scheme, and prove its security under standard security assumptions. In this way, patients have full privacy control over their PHRs. (3) We provide a thorough analysis of the complexity and scalability of our proposed secure PHR sharing solution, in terms of multiple metrics in computation, communication, storage and key management. We also compare our scheme to several previous ones in complexity, scalability and security. Furthermore, we demonstrate the efficiency of our scheme by implementing it on a modern workstation and performing experiments/simulations.