Blockchain-Based Fair Payment Protocol for Deduplication Cloud Storage System

Today more and more enterprises and individuals are outsourcing their data to cloud storage system. Data deduplication is one of the important technologies to reduce the storage cost of cloud storage system. In a cloud storage system with deduplication technology, the client can outsource the data files to the cloud storage server and pay for them. Fair payment is one of key issues in the cloud deduplication storage system. At present, a variety of secure deduplication encryption schemes have been designed to protect the privacy of client data. However, most existing fair payment solutions use traditional electronic cash systems to generate payment tokens, which requires a trusted authority to prevent double-spending. Trusted authorities will become bottlenecks in the payment system. Faced with this problem, in this paper, we propose a new decentralized fair payment protocol for cloud deduplication storage system by utilizing ethereum blockchain technology. The new protocol takes advantage of the decentralization of blockchain technology, allowing direct transactions without the participation of trusted third parties. In the new protocol, if a malicious situation occurs, the system can guarantee fair payment by pre-storing penalty money in the smart contract. Safety analysis and experimental analysis show that our new protocol is feasible.