CBFF: A cloud–blockchain fusion framework ensuring data accountability for multi-cloud environments

In order to develop emerging industries such as smart healthcare and intelligent transportation, the government has established various organizations and platforms to manage the growth of industries and encourage the cooperation of companies. However, as different companies’ data are scattered on different cloud platforms, it is difficult to have a unified control and reliable accountability for the operation of cloud data, which obstructs the establishment of platforms and cooperation. In this paper, to address the problems above, we propose a Cloud–Blockchain Fusion Framework (CBFF) to achieve data accountability among multiple clouds. CBFF improves the trustworthiness of operation to cloud data by designing secure mechanisms between clouds and blockchain. It designs a unified data Naming and Addressing Mechanism to publish and locate cloud data globally in a multi-cloud environment. Also, it proposes the Operation Tracing Mechanism to achieve reliable operation logging and tracing. With CBFF, we present a prototype implementation system using Hyperledger Fabric blockchain and Alibaba Cloud Computing. Our system could provide secure data uploading, sharing, and updating among multiple clouds. Finally, we also provide experiments and analysis to demonstrate that our framework has significant efficiency and security improvements.