Data storage auditing service in cloud computing: Challenges, methods and opportunities

Cloud computing is a promising computing model that enables convenient and on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources. The first offered cloud service is moving data into the cloud: data owners let cloud service providers host their data on cloud servers and data consumers can access the data from the cloud servers. This new paradigm of data storage service also introduces new security challenges, because data owners and data servers have different identities and different business interests. Therefore, an independent auditing service is required to make sure that the data is correctly hosted in the Cloud. In this paper, we investigate this kind of problem and give an extensive survey of storage auditing methods in the literature. First, we give a set of requirements of the auditing protocol for data storage in cloud computing. Then, we introduce some existing auditing schemes and analyze them in terms of security and performance. Finally, some challenging issues are introduced in the design of efficient auditing protocol for data storage in cloud computing. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC