Empowering Data Owners: An Efficient and Verifiable Scheme for Secure Data Deletion

Cloud services have attracted numerous enterprises, organizations, and individual users due to their exceptional computing power and almost limitless storage capacity. A vast amount of business data and private data are continuously uploaded to the cloud platform, driven by a series of attractive services offered by the cloud. Unfortunately, once data is uploaded to the cloud, its owner has no way of ensuring that it is actually deleted as intended. This obviously increases the concerns of data owners about the security of their data, because it is related to the privacy of users. Therefore, there must be a reliable solution to prove that data is deleted as requested by users, to prevent data leakage or abuse. In existing data deletion schemes, most are designed based on cryptographic knowledge rather than erasure or overwrite techniques, in order not to cause incalculable damage to the storage medium. However, most cryptographic-based data deletion schemes, particularly attribute-based encryption, involve numerous complex bilinear mapping operations, which are expensive for most devices. To address this issue, the paper proposes an Efficient and Verifiable Scheme for Secure Data Deletion (EVSD). Firstly, Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is introduced to achieve efficient encryption of data. Then, leveraging Linear Secret Sharing Scheme (LSSS), fine-grained data deletion policies supporting logical operations are implemented. Finally, the deletion of the data is efficiently verified using the root of the Merkle Hash Tree (MHT) generated by the defined illegal and legal attributes, while the deletion proof is also generated. Satisfactorily, security analysis shows that the EVSD scheme is much more advantageous compared to existing schemes, and a trait likewise is also observed in the performance evaluation. •Most encryption-based data deletion schemes involve many complex bilinear mapping operations, which are expensive for most devices. As far as the current research is concerned, our scheme is the most state-of-the-art, especially in terms of efficiency.•Efficient encryption scheme is implemented by encapsulating symmetric encryption key through simple scalar multiplication.•Accuracy and fine-grainedness of data deletion are achieved through the access control matrix in the ciphertext.•In order to implement an efficient verification algorithm, an efficient merkle tree is used to verify the deletion of data.•The proposed scheme makes most devices benefit