A Simulation Study of Outsourcing of Audit Service for Data Integrity in Cloud Computing

Abstract: Cloud computing technology enables data owners to outsource data and relieve from the burden of maintaining computing resources. This is possible as cloud provides platform independent, location independent, scalable and low-cost storage services. With virtualization technology, the cloud computing is made affordable. However, when data owners do not have physical possession of data, they need rely on security of cloud service providers completely. Integrity of their data is an important concern. Audit services that can ensure data integrity are essential. Many techniques came into existence in the recent past. Recently Zhu et al. presented Provable Data Possession (PDP) based interactive protocol for ensuring integrity of outsourced data. Based on this technique, in this paper we built a prototype application that demonstrates the proof of concept. The proposed application simulates the cloud environment where the audit service is provided for data integrity. The empirical results reveal that the application provides secure access to cloud services and provide data integrity.

Keywords: Security, cloud storage, interactive audit service