Certificateless remote data integrity checking using lattices in cloud storage

Due to the existence of many security threats in the cloud, remote data integrity checking (RDIC) is crucial for implementing secure cloud storage. It allows the data users to check the integrity of their data without retrieving whole data. As a solution to this, so far many researchers designed RDIC protocols using public key infrastructure (PKI). In this scenario, a public verifier must approve the data users’ certificates before the integrity checking task is to be performed. Thus, it suffers from the complex key management problem to approve the certificates, and it also incurs high computation cost over the public verifier. To solve the certificate management issue in PKI-based protocols and to provide security against quantum computer attacks, in this work, we design a Certificateless RDIC protocol using lattices. In this approach, the data integrity checking can be initiated using data owner’s identity (his name or email address) along with some secret information, which can guarantee the right public key is used for RDIC. Therefore, we can avoid the certificate management issue in PKI-based protocols to verify the data integrity. Finally, our security analysis guarantees that our Certificateless RDIC protocol is secure and it provides the privacy against the verifier, and performance analysis guarantees that it makes the less computation overhead over the public verifier.