SimLESS: A Secure Deduplication System Over Similar Data in Cloud Media Sharing

With the growing popularity of cloud computing, sharing media data through the cloud has become a common practice. Due to high information redundancy, media data take up a significant amount of storage space. Moreover, similar media data may have the same visual effect, resulting in unnecessary duplication. Thus, it can greatly improve the cloud storage efficiency by performing deduplication to the similar media data stored on the cloud. However, data privacy is a growing concern in cloud-based service. In this paper, we present SimLESS, a secure deduplication system for similar data in cloud media sharing. SimLESS allows the cloud to perform deduplication over the encrypted similar media data of different distributors while protecting the confidentiality and ownership of the data. When uploading a media file, SimLESS allows the distributor to set a distance threshold, and the cloud performs deduplication only when there is a file on the cloud whose distance from the file being uploaded is smaller than the threshold. Additionally, we provide fine-grained access control for distributors to ensure that only authorized media consumers can access the data. Furthermore, our system prevents any distributor from claiming ownership of a media file using only the tag of a similar file. We formally analyze the security of SimLESS and implement a system prototype to evaluate its performance. Our experimental results demonstrate that the computation and communication costs of SimLESS are practically affordable.