Assured data deletion in cloud computing: security analysis and requirements

Abstract

With the rapid development of cloud storage, more data owners store their data on the remote cloud to reduce the heavy local storage overhead. Cloud storage provides clients with a storage space that they may outsource and use on a pay-as-you-go basis. Due to data ownership separation and management, local data owners lose control over their data. Hence, all the operations over the outsourced data such as data transfer, update, and deletion, will be executed by the remote cloud server. As a result of that, various security challenges appear in terms of data privacy and integrity. In addition to data deletion that becomes an important security challenge, once a cloud user intends to delete his data, it must be sure that data is deleted from all cloud storage sources and prevent the cloud server from reserving the data maliciously for economic interests. In this paper, we present and discuss several types of research that use different technologies to solve assured deletion problems and verification the deletion result. The paper also presents a thorough analysis of the surveyed protocols in terms of fine-grained, security, performance, and requirements of remote cloud storage design.