Secure Data Deduplication with Dynamic Ownership Management in Cloud Storage

In cloud storage services, deduplication technology is commonly used to reduce the space and bandwidth requirements of services by eliminating redundant data and storing only a single copy of them. Deduplication is most effective when multiple users outsource the same data to the cloud storage, but it raises issues relating to security and ownership. Proof-of-ownership schemes allow any owner of the same data to prove to the cloud storage server that he owns the data in a robust way. However, many users are likely to encrypt their data before outsourcing them to the cloud storage to preserve privacy, but this hampers deduplication because of the randomization property of encryption. Recently, several deduplication schemes have been proposed to solve this problem by allowing each owner to share the same encryption key for the same data. However, most of the schemes suffer from security flaws, since they do not consider the dynamic changes in the ownership of outsourced data that occur frequently in a practical cloud storage service. In this paper, we propose a novel server-side deduplication scheme for encrypted data. It allows the cloud server to control access to outsourced data even when the ownership changes dynamically by exploiting randomized convergent encryption and secure ownership group key distribution. This prevents data leakage not only to revoked users even though they previously owned that data, but also to an honest-but-curious cloud storage server. In addition, the proposed scheme guarantees data integrity against any tag inconsistency attack. Thus, security is enhanced in the proposed scheme. The efficiency analysis results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is almost as efficient as the previous schemes, while the additional computational overhead is negligible.