Who Owns the Cloud Data? Exploring a non-interactive way for secure proof of ownership

Cloud storage is widely used for flexible and efficient data management, yet redundant data across users requires storage optimization. Deduplication helps by storing only unique data, making data sharing and ownership verification essential post-deduplication. Current Proof of Ownership (PoW) methods rely on interactive communication, leading to delays and performance issues during intensive data operations, and often assume a level of trust that may not hold in practical scenarios. To overcome these issues, we propose ES-PoW, a non-interactive secure proof of ownership scheme for cloud storage. ES-PoW performs ownership verification in a single round, avoiding delays in block verification. Using modular exponentiation and the discrete logarithm problem, ES-PoW generates and verifies ownership proofs efficiently. Unlike previous schemes, ES-PoW is resilient against brute-force, replay, and Man-in-the-Middle attacks, without relying on trusted nodes, making it better suited to real-world applications. Experimental results show that ES-PoW reduces I/O operation time and accelerates computation, achieving up to 53.6× and 54.5× speed improvements over current methods.