Cloud Data Storage Security: The Challenges and a Countermeasure

Cloud computing for utility-based services has emerged rapidly in recent years. Characteristics of cloud computing like on-demand network access, ubiquitous access to a shared pool of computing resources, pay as you go model, scalability gave popularity over traditional computing technologies. Now, by moving to the cloud environment, organizations can focus on quality of services by saving cost and time in infrastructure setup. Although the features of cloud computing empower the users, but few features like scalability, multitenancy leads threat to confidentiality and integrity. As a user of cloud does not have administrative control over physical resources and client data resides on vendor's premises, threat to confidentiality, integrity, and privacy may lead to customers to think before switching to a cloud environment. In this paper, we investigate flexible distributed storage integrity auditing mechanism, utilizing the homomorphic token and distributed erasure-coded data.