MD-POR: Multisource and Direct Repair for Network Coding-Based Proof of Retrievability

When data owners publish their data to a cloud storage, data integrity and availability become typical problems because the cloud servers are never trusted. To address these problems, researchers proposed the Proof of Retrievability (POR) protocol which allows a verifier to check and repair the data stored in the cloud servers. Based on the POR protocol, the network coding technique is commonly applied to increase the efficiency in data transmission and data repair. However, most previous schemes neither consider a practical scenario nor use the network coding efficiently. In this paper, a lightweight network coding-based POR scheme, called MD-POR (Multisource and Direct Repair for Proof of Retrievability) is proposed. Unlike previous schemes, the proposed MD-POR scheme allows multiple clients who have different secret keys to participate in the scheme. Moreover, the MD-POR scheme supports the direct repair feature in which a corrupted data can be recovered by the servers without burdening the clients. The MD-POR scheme also supports public authentication feature in which a third party auditor is employed to check the servers, and the client is thus free of the responsibility of periodically checking the servers. Furthermore, the MD-POR scheme is constructed based on a symmetric key setting.