Cloud computing has empowered the individual user by providing seemingly unlimited storage space and availability and accessibility of data anytime and anywhere. Cloud service providers are able to maximize data storage space by incorporating data deduplication into cloud storage. Although data deduplication removes data redundancy and data replication, it also introduces major data privacy and security issues for the user. In this paper, a new privacy-preserving framework that addresses this issue is proposed. Our framework uses an efficient deduplication algorithm to divide a given file into smaller units. These units are then encrypted by the user using the combination of a secure hash function and a block encryption algorithm. An index tree of hash values of these units is also generated and encrypted using an asymmetric search encryption scheme by the user. This index tree will enable the cloud service provider to search through the index and return the requested units. We will show that our proposed framework will allow cloud service and storage providers to employ data deduplication techniques without giving them access to either the users' plaintexts or the users' decryption keys.
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