Blockchain-Cloud Integration: Comprehensive Survey and Open Research Issues

Abstract

Cloud computing has attracted great interest in various scientific and technical fields recently as one of the widely adopted networking technologies. Despite their many benefits and applications, it still faces many security and trust challenges, including managing and controlling services, privacy, data integrity in distributed databases, data backup, and synchronization. Moreover, due to its centralized architecture, and lack of transparency and traceability, the results of the trust assessment cannot be fully recognized by all users. However, creating a trust-based transaction environment has become its key factor. Blockchain, with its nature of decentralization and security, can be leveraged to address these challenges and build a distributed and decentralized trust architecture, due to the underlying characteristics such as transparency, traceability, decentralization, security, immutability, and automation. This article makes a comprehensive study of how blockchain is applied to deliver security services in the cloud computing model, focusing on up-to-date approaches, opportunities, and future directions. This survey also discusses the benefits of the technical fusion of blockchain and cloud. It provides a classification of proposed systems based on privacy and key sharing, data sharing, authentication and access control, as well as auditing and data integrity. Finally, the main conclusions of this study will be the challenges and future directions to stimulate further research in this promising field.