Blockchain Based Secure Cloud Storage System for

Range Activity Data

Suman Mondal
Proof and Experimental Establishment (PXE)
DRDO
Chandipur, India
[email protected]

Abstract— To understand the actual behavior of any the insights of various techniques. Finally a working model
ammunition in different situations, dynamic firing needs to be is discussed for storage of range activity data.
carried out with various instruments for capturing data. On
premise storage and processing of that high volume and high II. CLOUD STORAGE
veracity data are not only compute intensive and sub optimized
but also vulnerable during any disaster. Cloud based storage Cloud computing is not a new terminology nowadays.
systems [1] are widely popular for off premise data storage and Starting from small organization [4]
4] to multi tier business
processing. At the same time data confidentiality,
ntiality, integrity and organization, everywhere the presence of cloud computing
availability are also prime concerns for range activity data, is visible. Cloud computing is basically used for resource
which can be addressed by using blockchain technology. sharing computation. It leverages the servers array spread
Though blockchain technology has been used in many areas across the globe to do highly compute intensive work very
like healthcare, business and finance, there has not been efficiently.
significant work on cloud storage security based on blockchain
technology. In this paper various cloud storage challenges are
discussed with their blockchain based solutions. Finally a
working model is discussed with all the required features for
storing high
igh volume and sensitive range activity data.

Keywords—Dynamic
Dynamic firing, cloud, storage, blockchain,
machine learning, privacy, big data

I. INTRODUCTION
Dynamic firing of ammunition under various
environmental conditions is of utmost importance to
determine the actual behavior.. Post firing data analysis has Fig. 1. Google trend for cloud storage search
to be done to determine the fitness of that ammunition for
the battlefield. For that reason a number of instruments like Cloud storage [5]5] is becoming popular when the data
different kinds of radars, cameras are deployed. The volume starts increasing exponentially. Fig. 1 shows the
deployed instruments generate a high volume and high Google trend graph of cloud storage search. The high
veracity data, which is also known as Big Data. Storing that volume, high speed and high veracity data are being
data on premise is not only a high computational task,
task but generated from every source of data like military
also vulnerable
erable during any disaster scenario. There has been information, social network, interactive
active videos etc. Cloud
an increased issue of storage and handling of data owing to storage is very efficient in terms of disaster recovery,
the inability of conventional data management tools to analytics and sharing. Cloud storage is extensively used in
manage the exponentially growing data. In such scenarios intra and inter cloud data transfer. In this scenario the user is
the limitations of weak devices will be overcome by agnostic to the physical location of the data storage
st servers
outsourcing the data to the cloud. and the same can be accessible throughout the globe over
the Internet.
Cloud computing technology is usually adopted in
military and commercial applications for data storage. But III. BLOCKCHAIN
the backend hardware and software for the storage is taken
from various vendors, which could
ld introduce Though cloud storage is extensively used in various
incompatibility and vulnerability [2].
2]. Various encryption domains [6, 7]] and by different users, they do not always
based secure clouds are there in the market but that are not trust the fact where their data is stored and who all are using
fully secured. At the same time encryption can only ensure the data. Hence the users feel the requirement of applying
confidentiality, neither data integrity nor availability. A safety efforts to have an aggregate authority over their data.
fully secured and highly available heterogeneous cloud can For this authentication, authorization, confidentiality,
be realized by using a relatively new but very promising integrity and availability [8]
8] are to be ensured. Blockchain
technology called blockchain [3]. 3]. Blockchain is a technology is best suited for all of the above. Blockchain is
distributed, decentralized, consensus based protocol to attain one of the most hyped advances and has gained considerable
secure and anonymous storage and transaction of data. attention in many fields of transaction related tasks
deployed in various areas. Blockchain is i cost effective and
In this study various blockchain techniques have been removes the central authority of data protection. Here the
discussed with their pros and cons for cloud storage and a miners are the real workers for ensuring the data protection
comparison based analysis has also been performed to get on the cloud. Fig. 2 shows the trend of blockchain over the
Internet. - Data Processoror (DP): Process the raw data before
sending that to the cloud.
- Data Verifier (DV): Verification of the user and
any damaged data stored in the cloud.
- Token Generator (TG): For saving data in the cloud
a valid token is necessary. The token generator
module generates a token for each transaction.
Whenever data is stored in the cloud the DP module does
the preprocessing work, then the DV module authenticates
authentica
the user and using that the TG module generates a token by
which the data is stored in distributed hubs over the cloud.
B. Data deduplication
Fig. 2. Google trend for blockchain search
Data deduplication is used to eliminate the superfluous
data and optimize the cloud storage. The technique retretains
In the blockchain every data transfer is cryptographically only one copy of the same data to optimize the storage
marked and confirmed by other miners holding the entire capacity [10].
10]. But in this case the data reliability problem
chain of records. Fig.. 3 depicts the architecture of can occur if the data are stored in a single cloud hub. To
blockchain. The basic features of blockchain are overcome the problem the data are distributed to different
servers using deduplication
uplication techniques and then store all the
- Decentralization related information in blockchain. Using that cloud
- Distributed optimization and data integrity can be ensured.
- Consensus
- Anonymous The data deduplication can be done in two ways, i.e. file
- Traceable level deduplication and chunk level deduplication. In file
level deduplication, for each file before storage a consistent
hash value is calculated and if that matches another pre pre-
stored file hash value, and then discard that data from
storage. In case of chunk level deduplication the file is
divided into fixed
ed length or variable length chunks and does
the same task mentioned above and maintains only one copy
of identical chunks.
C. Data integrity checking
The distributed and decentralized data integrity can be
enabled by blockchain technology. Blockchain uses use Merkle
trees for data integrity checking [11].
11]. Before storing the data
in the cloud, the data are sliced into fixed sized blocks and
different shards are created using those. The shards are then
used to create the Merkle tree. The Merkle trees can be
Fig. 3. Blockchain architecture many y types but in this case a hash based Merkle tree is
considered. After the creation of the Merkle tree it is
approved by the user and the cloud storage service provider
IV. OBJECTIVES and the user stores the root of the tree. Finally the user’s
data and the Merkle tree are re stored in the cloud and the
In this paper mainly the following points are discussed
address is sent back to the user.
based on cloud storage and blockchain.
During the data fetch cycle the cloud storage provider
C1. Cryptographic techniques. receives a challenge number from the client and uses that a
C2. Data deduplication. particular shard is chosen using blockchain [12] [ based
searching technique and sends the data back to the user.
C3. Data integrity checking.
D. Storage efficiency
C4. Storage efficiency.
With the advancement of Internet data growth is
C5. Array based storage for redundancy. showing an exponential graph. At the same time data are
C7. Auditing scheme. coming from different sources and creates a huge pool of
heterogeneous data. In such scenario
scenarios a relational database
C8. Security and Privacy. will not work efficiently. Non-relational
relational and non
non-structural
databases are very efficient in storing high volume and high
A. Blockchain-based
based cryptographic techniques
veracity data. NoSQL like MongoDB, DocumenDB,
The technique allows the users to send the data to the Hadoop etc are widely used in cloud storage.
cloud in encoded or encrypted form and then dist distribute the
whole data in chunks to different cloud hubs [[9]. At the At the same time processing
rocessing that huge data set to either
same time the availability has to be ensured whenever the real time query resolution or analytics are very compute
data is queried by an authorized user. The structure of the intensive tasks. Map reduce techniques can be deployed to
cryptography storage is divided in three parts, as follow do the same, which is very efficient over key-value
key [13] pair
based databases. The underlying database can be used as Any trace of even slightly left over data can make the client
blockchain functionalities like hashed blocks, transactions and its other information public. For that reason every user
and immutable record storage [14]. sends data with a randomly generated number, from which
the client or its data cannot be guessed. But the data
E. Array based storage for redundancy transaction must be traceable at the same time, because in
For distributed storage and maintaining the high case of any inconsistency, the backtracking of traceable data
availability network the redundant storage is mandatory. At can make the whole system a consistent one.
the same time user requests have to be rerouted to the less
loaded server. This strategy is also based on the strategic
location of the user and the requested data. To accomplish
the task a storage load balancer is deployed which will
V. WORKING CLOUD STORAGE MODEL
decide the route to the data storage. The storages have to be In this section we will explore various requirements of a
consistent, so that the data requested from any server should cloud storage system for storing high volume and sensitive
not conflict. Blockchain technology can be used to maintain data related to daily range activities. Nowadays the cloud
the metadata intact. During data storage the data are storage spaces are being used as a commodity where users
distributed and the metadata i.e. the data about the data are pay as per usage. The basic features of the cloud storage of
stored as a block in the blockchain. range activity data are as follows:
As the data are stored in different storage servers peer- ● It is a BlockDS [9] system for a reliable and
to-peer technology [14] can also be deployed for faster data distributed storage service for data storage and
fetch. Simultaneously data can be fetched from all the query resolution with blockchain technology as the
servers and at the client end integration will be done. In the backend.
data fetch pipeline the blockchain will ensure the data ● Deduplication of data storage [10], where the
integrity. Sometime due to lack of hardware support at the whole data is divided into chunks of 1MB each and
client end, the huge volume data integration takes a store the chunks in a distributed fashion without
significant time. To address the issue multilevel data any central authority.
integrators can be deployed and at each integrator some ● Data integrity [11] is ensured by blockchain based
portion of the fetched data will be integrated and the final data integrity service. Here the model verifies the
data will be sent to the client. consumer as well the data holder by a trustworthy
verification process without any third party.
F. Auditing scheme
● It is a peer-to-peer based data storage system [12],
With the fast increment of cloud based technologies and where the data transfer rate is much faster. At the
storage of sensitive and high volume data, the need of same time the fetched data is integrated to produce
regular auditing is becoming a need of the cloud technology. the whole data. During the integration phase data
An open or public auditing can be done using blockchain consistency must be ensured. Merkle tree based
and Rank-based Merker AVL tree (RB-MAT)[19] to consistency checking is done in this case. Using the
achieve privacy conservation and batch auditing to preserve same Merkle tree performance tuning and
the protection of the updated blocks in the blockchain. This reliability are also ensured.
process is quite faster and audited data cannot be altered as ● The blockchain based data storage system is
the audited information is stored in a blockchain. distributed in nature, where the users divide their
A smart and decentralized auditing can also be done data in encrypted chunks [15] and upload those to
using machine learning approaches. Stability and reliability the specified cloud.
can also be ensured using this approach as this is ● The proposed cloud storage model is also capable
decentralized. At the same time due to its automatic nature of controlling the access to the data [16]. The
the user is also get ridden from regular check. The machine blockchain based access control system is robust in
learning model automatically does the audit and stores the nature due to its distributed and consensus nature.
information in a distributed blockchain and warns the user The model also ensures secure storage in an
wherever some anomaly is found. untrustworthy space of the Internet using
encryption based on Ethereum smart contract.
G. Security and privacy ● The model is also capable of inter organizational
Blockchain is well known for its security and privacy cloud transfer [17]. When data is so huge that
[21]. The blockchain discards the central authority for any transferring of data takes too much time, inter
sorts of authorization; hence the central point of failure is organizational cloud transfer can do the job very
also not present in blockchain. The whole security and efficiently. In this case the data block pointer is
privacy of the storage and its metadata is done collectively. changed accordingly.
A proof-of-work and proof-of-storage is implemented for ● Deletion of data is very crucial [18]. Even a small
improving blockchain security. Even though the security left over data can create havoc. To completely wipe
and privacy features are improving continuously. An out data when the user is removed or the specified
intruder tries relentlessly to forge the chain in the system is discarded and deletion of data becomes
blockchain. To address the problem, checking and auditing important, blockchain technology can be deployed
are being done. for footprint-less data deletion schemes. Any
malevolent behavior can also be detected by this
When blockchain is used in the cloud computing method as well.
environment, the anonymity of the user data has to be ● Regular auditing of the server activities and data
ensured, and the client data should be completely erased transfer to and fro to the cloud is indispensable to
whenever the user is removed or the software is deleted.
 track and rectify any disruptive behavior [20]. An
agent less audition scheme is developed for
automated auditing. Machine learning approaches REFERENCES
can also be taken to generate early warning
systems, whenever any such activities are [1] Zhihua Xia, Xinhui Wang, Liangao Zhang, Zhan Qin, Xingming Sun,
predicted. and Kui Ren. 2016. A privacy-preserving and copy-deterrence
content-based image retrieval scheme in cloud computing. IEEE
VI. CONCLUSION Trans. Info. Forensics Secur. 11, 11 (2016), 2594–2608.
[2] Xueping Liang, Sachin Shetty, Deepak Tosh, Charles Kamhoua,
Integration of blockchain with cloud technology [22] can Kevin Kwiat, and Laurent Njilla. 2017. Provchain:A blockchain-
solve many real world problems in a holistic manner. Data based data provenance architecture in cloud environment with
protection over a public or private cloud is always enhanced privacy and availability.In Proceedings of the 17th
challenging for many organizations. Nowadays IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud, and Grid
Computing. 468–477.
“Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS), “Platform as a Service”
[3] Michael Nofer, Peter Gomber, Oliver Hinz, and Dirk Schiereck. 2017.
(PaaS) and “Software as a Service” (SaaS) are very popular Blockchain. Bus. Info. Syst. Engineer. 59, 3 (2017), 183–187.
and widely used. With the advent of blockchain
[4] Sushant Rajkumar Patil. 2016. A comparative review on Ceph and
“Blockchain as a Service” (BaaS) is also promising as a Swift open source cloud storage platform, global trends in signal
backend technology to solve the data privacy and integrity processing. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on
problems. There are a number of cloud providers with Information Computing and Communication (ICGTSPICC’16).
limitless client access but without proper data protection. [5] David Brian Ferriera. 2014. Policy driven cloud storage management
Range activity data is not only huge in volume but also very and cloud storage policy router. 5 (2014), 8
sensitive in nature and data theft of such kind of information [6] A. Maxmen. 2018. AI researchers embrace bitcoin technology to
can be extremely dangerous. To utilize the cloud data share medical data. Nature, 555 (2018), 7696.
storage facilities without any data loss using blockchain [7] Wei Cai, Zehua Wang, Jason B. Ernst, Zhen Hong, Chen Feng, and
some measurements have to be taken a priori. In a Victor C. M. Leung. 2018. Decentralized applications: the
blockchain-empowered software system. IEEE Access 6 (2018),
blockchain system every data transaction has to be part of 53019–53033.
the consistent chain and for huge volume data the
[8] Zachary Baynham-Herd, 2017. Enlist blockchain to boost
transaction can be massive. To handle such massive conservation. Nature 548, 7669 (2017), 523–523.
transactional information scalability and flexibility has to be [9] Hoang Giang Do and Wee Keong Ng. 2017. Blockchain-based system
the crucial functionalities of the cloud. To accommodate for secure data storage with private keyword search. In Proceedings of
high volume and high speed data the servers should be the IEEE World Congress on Services (SERVICES’17). 90–93.
capable enough to process and store the metadata as well. [10] Li, Jingyi, Jigang Wu, Long Chen, and Jiaxing Li. 2018.
The below mentioned characteristics are ensured for the Deduplication with blockchain for secure cloud storage. In
cloud storage for storing and processing day-to-day range Proceedings of the CCF Conference on Big Data. Springer, 558–570.
activity information. [11] Liu, Bin, Xiao Liang Yu, Shiping Chen, Xiwei Xu, and Liming Zhu.
2017. Blockchain based data integrity service framework for IoT data.
● User authentication management system for In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Web Services
verifying and validating the user before storing or (ICWS’17). 468–475.
fetching range data [23]. [12] Yue, Dongdong, Ruixuan Li, Yan Zhang, Wenlong Tian, and
● Data classification is done as it is necessary to Chengyi Peng. 2018. blockchain based data integrity verification in
determine various kinds of data. This determination p2p cloud storage. In Proceedings of the IEEE 24th International
Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS’18). 561–
helps the cloud manager to allocate different types 568.
of hardware and software functionalities for [13] Deka Ganesh Chandra, Ravi Prakash, and Swati Lamdharia. 2012. A
different types of data [24]. study on cloud database. In Proceedings of the 4th IEEE International
● Hardware security is always an underestimated Conference on Computational Intelligence and Communication
topic for cloud based applications as they are Networks (CICN’12). 513–519.
agnostic in nature. But hardware security is of [14] Josef Gattermayer and Pavel Tvrdik. 2017. Blockchain-based multi-
utmost importance for storage of sensitive data like level scoring system for P2P clusters. In Proceedings of the 46th
range data. Various hardware attacks like side International Conference on Parallel Processing Workshops
(ICPPW’17). 301–308.
channel attacks can sniff important data using only
[15] Jiaxing Li, Jigang Wu, and Long Chen. 2018. Block-Secure:
basic features of hardware like heat dissipation
Blockchain based scheme for secure P2P cloud storage. Info. Sci.
pattern. 465, 219–231.
The above mentioned security and privacy features are [16] Ilya Sukhodolskiy and Sergey Zapechnikov. 2018. A blockchain-
adopted in the cloud storage systems with the help of based access control system for cloud storage. In Proceedings of the
IEEE Conference of Russian Young Researchers in Electrical and
blockchain technology, and trustworthy range activity data Electronic Engineering (EIConRus’18). 1575–1578.
storage is built without compromising any loopholes and [17] Jason Paul Cruz, Yuichi Kaji, and Naoto Yanai. 2018. RBAC-SC:
without any third-party centrally managed authority. The Role-based access control using smart contract. IEEE Access 6
same idea can impact cloud storage to appropriately use (2018), 12240–12251
peer-to-peer networks for faster data transaction also. The [18] S. Pavithra, S. Ramya, and S. Prathibha. 2019. A survey on cloud
blockchain technology can make a paradigm shift to the security issues and blockchains. In Proceedings of the 3rd
existing working model. Blockchain is still in the primitive International Conference on Computing and Communication
stage in the cloud storage era but the impact of that will Technologies (ICCCT’19), 136–140.
surely open many ways for some very different and [19] Han Wang, Xu An Wang, Shuai Xiao, and Zichen Zhou. 2019.
Blockchain-based public auditing scheme for shared data. In
innovative outcomes.
Proceedings of the International Conference on Innovative Mobile
 and Internet Services in Ubiquitous Computing. Springer, Cham, [22] Lizhe Wang, Rajiv Ranjan, Jinjun Chen, and Boualem Benatallah.
197–206. 2011. Cloud computing: Methodology, systems, and applications.
[20] Hiayang Yu and Zhen Yang. 2018. Decentralized and smart public CRC Press
auditing for cloud Storage. In Proceedings of the IEEE 9th [23] Jacobovitz, Ori. 2016. Blockchain for identity management. The
International Conference on Software Engineering and Service Lynne and William Frankel Center for Computer Science Department
Science (ICSESS’18) (491–494). IEEE. of Computer Science. Ben-Gurion University, Beer Sheva.
[21] Jin Ho Park and Jong Hyuk Park. 2017. Blockchain security in cloud [24] Jia Yu, Kui Ren, Cong Wang, and Vijay Varadharajan. 2015.
computing: Use cases, challenges and solutions.Symmetry 9, 8 Enabling cloud storage auditing with key-exposure resistance. IEEE
(2017), 1–13. Trans. Info. Forensics Secur. 10, 6 (2015), 1167–1179.