Towards Privacy-assured and Lightweight On-chain Auditing of Decentralized Storage

Yuefeng Du, Huayi Duan, Anxin ZHOU, Cong Wang, Man Ho Au, Qian Wang

Research output: Chapters, Conference Papers, Creative and Literary WorksRGC 32 - Refereed conference paper (with host publication)peer-review

33 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

How to audit outsourced data in centralized storage like cloud is well-studied, but it is largely under-explored for the rising decentralized storage network (DSN) that bodes well for a billion-dollar market. To realize DSN as a usable service in a fully decentralized manner, the blockchain comes in handy — to record and verify audit trails in forms of proof of storage, and based on that, to enforce fair payments with necessary dispute resolution.

Leaving the audit trails on the blockchain offers transparency and fairness, yet it 1) sacrifices privacy, as they may leak information about the data under audit, and 2) overwhelms on-chain resources, as they may be practically large in size and expensive to verify. Prior auditing designs in centralized settings are not directly applicable here. A handful of proposals targeting DSN cannot satisfactorily address these issues either.

We present an auditing solution that addresses on-chain privacy and efficiency, from a synergy of homomorphic linear authenticators with polynomial commitments for succinct proofs, and the sigma protocol for provable privacy. The solution results in, per audit, 288-byte proof written to the blockchain, and constant verification cost. It can sustain long-term operation and easily scale to thousands of users on Ethereum.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2020 IEEE 40th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems
Subtitle of host publicationICDCS 2020
PublisherIEEE
Pages201-211
ISBN (Electronic)9781728170022
ISBN (Print)9781728170039
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Nov 2020
Event40th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS 2020) - Virtual, Singapore
Duration: 29 Nov 20201 Dec 2020
Conference number: 40
https://icdcs2020.sg/

Publication series

Name
ISSN (Print)1063-6927
ISSN (Electronic)2575-8411

Conference

Conference40th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS 2020)
Abbreviated titleICDCS'20
PlaceSingapore
Period29/11/201/12/20
Internet address

Bibliographical note

Research Unit(s) information for this publication is provided by the author(s) concerned.

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