A Scalable Data Provenance Mechanism for Cloud Environment using Ethereum Blockchain

Cloud computing has become an important technology for the processing of large computationally expensive programs and data from real-world. IT organizations are en-trusting the cloud vendors for the security of their computational infrastructures including the data. Thus, there is a need for better provenance assurance for the data present in the cloud for better security and to establish trust between the cloud vendors and customers. Blockchain technology operates in a decentralized way for building trust between the entities in the system using immutable ledger. In this work, we propose the decentralized and trusted cloud data provenance mechanism using Ethereum blockchain platform, IPFS and scalable consensus mechanism. PoW is the consensus algorithm currently used in Ethereum Blockchain. PoW consensus mechanism needs lot of computational power for the processing of data in the Blockchain. Thus, we implement Proof of Stake (POS) consensus algorithm in Ethereum to improve the efficiency of the proposed data provenance mechanism. We demonstrate the performance of PoS-enabled provenance framework in a multi-node testbed. The results reveal that POS performs better than PoW for cloud data provenance.