A Lightweight And privacy-preserving public cloud auditing scheme without bilinear pairings in smart cities

Smart Cities have become a global strategy. However, massive data generated by various smart devices need to be uploaded and stored to the cloud servers. It is critical to ensure the integrity and privacy of the stored data. Quite a few public cloud auditing schemes have been proposed recently. However, most of them use bilinear pairing operations in the audit phase, requiring a significant time cost. Meanwhile, users (may be resource-constrained mobile devices or sensor nodes) still need to perform significant computations, like computing meta data for each data block, which bring a huge burden of calculation for these users. Moreover, those schemes cannot effectively protect users’ data privacy. Thus, we propose a lightweight and privacy-preserving public cloud auditing scheme for smart cities that does not require bilinear pairings. First, the proposed scheme is pairing-free, and allowing a third party auditor to generate authentication meta set on behalf of users. Furthermore, it also protects data privacy against the third party auditor and the cloud service providers. In addition, this new scheme can be easily and naturally extended to batch auditing in a multi-user scenario. Detailed security and performance analyses show that the proposed scheme is more secure and efficient compared to the existing public cloud auditing schemes.