Security and Privacy of Cloud Data Auditing Protocols: A Review, State-of-the-art, Open Issues, and Future Research Directions

Abstract

Cloud service providers offer a trustworthy and resistant-based storage environment for on-demand cloud services to outsource clients' data. Several researchers and business entities currently adopt cloud services to store their data in remote cloud storage servers for cost-saving purposes. Cloud storage offers numerous advantages to users like scalability, low capital expenses, and data available from any place, anytime, regardless of location and device. However, as the users lose physical access and control over data, the storage service raises security and privacy issues, such as confidentiality, integrity, and availability of outsourced data. Data integrity is a primary concern for cloud users to confirm whether data integrity is intact or not. This paper presents a comprehensive review of cloud data auditing schemes and a comparative analysis of the desirable features. Furthermore, it provides advantages and disadvantages of the state-of-the-art techniques and a performance comparison regarding the communicational and computational costs of involved entities. It also highlights desirable features of different techniques, open issues, and future research trends of cloud data auditing protocols.