IndexTree: An Efficient Tamper-Evidence Logging

Data integrity is critical for many applications. With huge amount of data shared with the cloud computing platform, i.e. Amazon S3, GFS, Apache Hadoop etc, the risk of damage is increasing at the same time. Equivocation is a powerful tool that malicious nodes can use to poison the states of honest nodes and escape punishment. Accountability which makes the system actions verifiable has become the first-class citizen in distributed system design. Tamper-evidence logging is a useful utility to construct accountable system, and is used in different self-certify systems. In this paper, we present Index Tree which is a utility for tamper-evidence logging construction. Index Tree supports efficient proof generation and verification and its proof size is much smaller which is convenient to exchange among distributed nodes. Experiments show Index Tree has advantages in proof size, proof generation and verification compared with AASL.