Open Access

ARTICLE

Towards Privacy-Preserving Cloud Storage: A Blockchain Approach

Jia-Shun Zhang¹, Gang Xu^2,*, Xiu-Bo Chen¹, Haseeb Ahmad³, Xin Liu⁴, Wen Liu^5,6,7

1 Information Security Center, State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, 100876, China
2 School of Information Science and Technology, North China University of Technology, Beijing, 100144, China
3 Department of Computer Science, National Textile University, Faisalabad, 37610, Pakistan
4 Inner Mongolia University of Science & Technology, School of Information Engineering, Baotou, 014010, China
5 State Key Laboratory of Media Convergence and Communication, Communication University of China
6 School of Computer Science and Cybersecurity, Communication University of China
7 Key Laboratory of Convergent Media and Intelligent Technology Communication University of China, Ministry of Education, Beijing, 102204, China

* Corresponding Author: Gang Xu. Email:

Computers, Materials & Continua 2021, 69(3), 2903-2916. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2021.017227

Received 24 January 2021; Accepted 11 March 2021; Issue published 24 August 2021

Abstract

With the rapid development of cloud computing technology, cloud services have now become a new business model for information services. The cloud server provides the IT resources required by customers in a self-service manner through the network, realizing business expansion and rapid innovation. However, due to the insufficient protection of data privacy, the problem of data privacy leakage in cloud storage is threatening cloud computing. To address the problem, we propose BC-PECK, a data protection scheme based on blockchain and public key searchable encryption. Firstly, all the data is protected by the encryption algorithm. The privacy data is encrypted and stored in a cloud server, while the ciphertext index is established by a public key searchable encryption scheme and stored on the blockchain. Secondly, based on the characteristics of trusted execution of smart contract technology, a control mechanism for data accessing and sharing is given. Data transaction is automatically recorded on the blockchain, which is fairer under the premise of ensuring the privacy and security of the data sharing process. Finally, we analyzed the security and fairness of the current scheme. Through the comparison with similar schemes, we have shown the advantages of the proposed scheme.

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Keywords

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