Design and Implementation of a Novel Approach for Assured Data Deletion in Cloud Storage

Abstract

Cloud storage usage increases widely with rapid development in technology. It reduces the data owner s burden of data storing, updating, deleting as well as maintaining activities. However, data deletion on the cloud platform becoming a security challenge due to the non-existence of an assured mechanism that acknowledges data owners about data deletion. The remanence of the data on the cloud may result in a potential threat and can be explored by unauthorized users to gain access to the data. Assured data deletion and verification is the basic requirement for data owners once the data stored in the cloud is no longer required. This research work aims to propose a trustworthy secure data storage mechanism by adopting the replication factor to increase the secure storage and availability of data in the cloud and secure data deletion method by overwriting it with a non-retrievable bit sequence. To make it more robust, the blockchain-based smart contract is developed to guarantee data insertion, data deletion and verification with a secure storage mechanism. The experiments were carried out using an AWS small ec2 server cloud environment with various sizes of data to validate the claim of the proposed methodology without requiring any trusted third party. The algorithm is also validated by proving the security properties, efficiency, practicality, robustness of the proposed approach. newline newline