Enabling Secure and Efficient Decentralized Storage Auditing with Blockchain

As a promising alternative solution to cloud storage, decentralized storage networks (DSN) are widely anticipated to develop continuously and reshape the storage market share in the foreseeable future. In particular, one of the most important research problems is how to enforce the quality of service (QoS) in the context of storage solutions. Despite plenty of auditing-related works in the context of cloud storage, none of them can be directly applied to the decentralized storage paradigm. The challenges of designing a feasible storage auditing framework emanate from two aspects: 1) security problems unique to the decentralized settings and 2) performance overhead due to on-chain operations. In this article, we first put forward a basic storage auditing framework that satisfies the security and efficiency requirements, and outperforms the existing approaches. We also identify a critical and overlooked security problem that would compromise the integrity of storage auditing solutions in the blockchain paradigm. With our refined storage auditing design based on customized zero knowledge protocols, we propose a convenient mitigation solution in our revised security model. The evaluation results confirm that our solution would only incur a 10–15 percent increase in the overall auditing costs for common usage scenarios, compared to the basic design.