Publicly verifiable data transfer and deletion scheme for cloud storage

With the rapid development of cloud storage, more and more resource-constraint data owners can employ cloud storage services to reduce the heavy local storage overhead. However, the local data owners lose the direct control over their data, and all the operations over the outsourced data, such as data transfer and deletion, will be executed by the remote cloud server. As a result, the data transfer and deletion have become two security issues because the selfish remote cloud server might not honestly execute these operations for economic benefits. In this article, we design a scheme that aims to make the data transfer and the transferred data deletion operations more transparent and publicly verifiable. Our proposed scheme is based on vector commitment (VC), which is used to deal with the problem of public verification during the data transfer and deletion. More specifically, our new scheme can provide the data owner with the ability to verify the data transfer and deletion results. In addition, by using the advantages of VC, our proposed scheme does not require any trusted third party. Finally, we prove that the proposed scheme not only can reach the expected security goals but also can satisfy the efficiency and practicality.