Use of Blockchain for Ensuring Data Integrity in Cloud Databases

摘要

This paper proposes a novel method for using a PoW-based Blockchain to ensure data integrity in cloud database management sys-tems. The use of cloud platforms for storing data or even hosting databases is incredibly huge, and in many cases, there is no convenient way for a client to check the integrity of the data stored in the cloud database. To solve this, we propose a technique based on an interaction between the cloud platform and a PoW-based Blockchain. This interaction exploits a Distributed Hash Table and lightweight software agents, which are monitoring changes done to cloud database storage nodes. Data update operations are published by the agents as Blockchain log/audit transactions that propagate deep into the Blockchain network until they become immutably and cryptograph-ically protected by it. The proposed method enables the Cloud Provider to manage metadata so that it will be able to easily detect deliberate or accidental corruptions of transactions and to recover the transactions in case such a data corruption incident occurs.