Don't trust the cloud, verify: Integrity and consistency for cloud object stores

Abstract

Cloud services have turned remote computation into a commodity and enable convenient online collaboration. However, they require that clients fully trust the service provider in terms of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Toward reducing this dependency, this article introduces VICOS, a protocol for verification of integrity and consistency for cloud object storage that enables a group of mutually trusting clients to detect data integrity and consistency violations for a cloud object storage service. It aims at services where multiple clients cooperate on data stored remotely on a potentially misbehaving service. VICOS enforces the consistency notion of fork-linearizability, supports wait-free client semantics for most operations, and reduces the computation and communication overhead compared to previous protocols. VICOS is based on a generic authenticated data structure. Moreover, its operations cover the hierarchical name space of a cloud object store, supporting a real-world interface and not only a simplistic abstraction. A prototype of VICOS that works with the key-value store interface of commodity cloud storage services has been implemented, and an evaluation demonstrates its advantage compared to existing systems.