A Blockchain Approach to Ensuring Provenance to Outsourced Cloud Data in a Sharing Ecosystem

Cloud servers offer data owners the opportunityto upload and store encrypted data that several data users can access. However, after outsourcing data to the cloud, data owners have limited control of their data, and external systems are incorporated to manage it. Several research-based solutions use encryption techniques to prevent unauthorized access to the data but ignore the challenge of maintaining the trace of valid changes applied to the data. Provenance data can be used to ascertain the integrity of data and, therefore, should be immutable and secured from adversaries since it contains private information. This article proposes an efficient way of securing access logs by leveraging blockchain. A generic framework is designed, tested, and evaluated, with results showing our model can effectively enhance the security of provenance data. This work considers two categories of data users and account for the distinct roles and permitted actions on the outsourced data. In summary, this work ensures that the data is trustworthy, and verification and management of the outsourced data are assured. Experimental results illustrate the efficiency and scalability of our solution.