An efficient data audit scheme based on ZSS short signature for secure cloud storage

Cloud computing offers storage as a service which invites individual users and the corporations to move their sensitive data to the cloud. But, since cloud is only semi-trusted, it is mandatory for the users to verify the integrity of the data at regular intervals. Zhu et al. in 2013 had proposed a BLS signature based data auditing scheme which performs better than its previous works. In this research work, a novel data audit scheme based on ZSS short signature is proposed and it has been designed to incur relatively lesser computational costs during the signature generation, proof generation and proof verification scenarios. The proposed protocol derives its efficiency from Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem utilizing the power of elliptic curve cryptography. The correctness of the proposed protocol ensures the validity of the scheme and the soundness of the protocol ensures its strength during the mischievous activity by a pretending cloud server during the data or signature loss. The performance comparison and the results are convincing that, this work can be used in place of the Zhu et al’s work in real-time environments.