Blockchain-Based Self-Auditing Scheme with Batch Verification for Decentralized Storage

Data owners outsource their data to remote storage providers without keeping local replicas to save their precious storage resources. However, the ownership and management of data are separated after outsourcing. How to ensure the integrity and recoverability of outsourced data becomes a significant problem. Provable Data Possession (PDP) and Proofs of Retrievability (POR) are two cryptographic protocols that enable users to verify the integrity of outsourced data. Nevertheless, the state-of-the-art PDP and POR schemes either need users to perform the complicated audit tasks by themselves or delegate these tasks to a Third-Party Auditor (TPA). Moreover, these schemes are constructed on a centralized storage framework which vulnerably suffers single-point-of-failure. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based decentralized self-auditing scheme with batch verification. Firstly, data owners outsource their data to decentralized storage nodes, which can achieve self-auditing based on blockchain without TPA. Secondly, our scheme uses Pedersen-based polynomial commitment to significantly reduce the number of authenticators. Furthermore, we propose a batch verification algorithm, which can verify multiple proofs from different storage nodes to improve the verification efficiency. Finally, we analyze the security of our scheme and implement a gas-efficient system prototype using the smart contracts of the Ethereum Reposten test network. The results demonstrate that the scheme is practical.