Blockchain & Multi-Agent System: A New Promising Approach for Cloud Data Integrity Auditing with Deduplication

Abstract

Recently, data storage represents one of the most important services in Cloud Computing. The cloud provider should ensure two major requirements which are data integrity and storage efficiency. Blockchain data structure and the efficient data deduplication represent possible solutions to address these exigencies. Several approaches have been proposed, some of them implement deduplication in Cloud server side, which involves a lot of computation to eliminate the redundant data and it becomes more and more complex. Therefore, this paper proposed an efficient, reliable and secure approach, in which the authors propose a Multi-Agent System in order to manipulate deduplication technique that permits to reduce data volumes thereby reduce storage overhead. On the other side, the loss of physical control over data introduces security challenges such as data loss, data tampering and data modification. To solve similar problems, the authors also propose Blockchain as a database for storing metadata of client files. This database serves as logging database that ensures data integrity auditing function.