Provable Data Possession of Resource-constrained Mobile Devices in Cloud Computing

Abstract

Benefited from cloud storage services, users can save their cost of buying expensive storage and application servers, as well as deploying and maintaining applications. Meanwhile they lost the physical control of their data. So effective methods are needed to verify the correctness of the data stored at cloud servers, which are the research issues the Provable Data Possession (PDP) faced. The most important features in PDP are: 1) supporting for public, unlimited numbers of times of verification; 2) supporting for dynamic data update; 3) efficiency of storage space and computing. In mobile cloud computing, mobile end-users also need the PDP service. However, the computing workloads and storage burden of client in existing PDP schemes are too heavy to be directly used by the resource-constrained mobile devices. To solve this problem, with the integration of the trusted computing technology, this paper proposes a novel public PDP scheme, in which the trusted third-party agent (TPA) takes over most of the calculations from the mobile end-users. By using bilinear signature and Merkle hash tree (MHT), the scheme aggregates the verification tokens of the data file into one small signature to reduce communication and storage burden. MHT is also helpful to support dynamic data update. In our framework, the mobile terminal devices only need to generate some secret keys and random numbers with the help of trusted platform model (TPM) chips, and the needed computing workload and storage space is fit for mobile devices. Our scheme realizes provable secure storage service for resource-constrained mobile devices in mobile cloud computing.