BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY FOR CLOUD STORAGE

Abstract

The demand for blockchain innovation and the significance of its application has inspired ever-progressing exploration in various scientific and practical areas. Even though it is still in the initial testing stage, the blockchain is being viewed as a progressive solution to address present-day technology concerns, such as decentralization, identity, trust, ownership of data, and information-driven choices. Blockchain technology plays a vital role in various applications such as supply chain, Internet of Things, multimedia, healthcare sector, and cloud computing. Nowadays, blockchain is one of the advanced technologies to ensure sensitive or confidential data security. Thus, blockchain technology tremendously benefits the cloud storage system due to its several features, namely decentralization, confidentiality, security, privacy, etc. However, the conventional cloud storage model suffers from various security threats and privacy issues such as centralized data storage, which compromises server security, and the need for trusted third parties, affecting user privacy. Also, the data contained in many data centers are not completely distributed in today's distributed cloud computing. As a result, data security, integrity, and availability are adversely affected. Therefore, this research work integrates blockchain technology with a cloud storage system to provide reliable and secure cloud storage services for enterprises or individual users. This research work presented the five significant contributions in the blockchain-based cloud storage domain. First, we have conducted a literature review of blockchain technology for cloud storage systems to highlight the challenges of the existing work and identify the various applications areas of the blockchain-based cloud system. Second, we proposed a novel blockchain-based decentralized architecture for the cloud storage system to deal with identified challenges and provide an effective solution to cloud users. The proposed architecture implements the Ciphertext Policy Attribute-based Encryption (CP-ABE) algorithm to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability features. It provides a complete distributed environment for storing key-related information, user access policy, and integrity checking details in the blockchain structure. The proposed architecture is developed using the Java programming language. The various experiments are iv conducted using tools such as CloudSim and Jmeter to evaluate the performance and analyze the efficiency of the proposed architecture. Third, the proposed blockchain network also deployed the Honeybee optimization algorithm on a cloud storage system to optimize the resources and minimize the transaction response and execution time. Fourth, the proposed work is further enhanced to include attribute authority entities and ensure fine-grained access control with the user revocation process without any trusted authority. Various experiments analyze the performance and compare the proposed architecture with various existing works. Lastly, the proposed blockchain-based cloud architecture is deployed in different domains such as healthcare and intrusion detection systems to analyze its performance. The proposed architecture is implemented using the Ethereum platform and InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) storage system to manage the data in the healthcare domain. Further, the blockchain architecture is developed for intrusion detection systems to identify the intruder node in the voting system using an adaptive behavior model. The experimental results, analysis, and performance evaluation demonstrate that the proposed work provides a feasible and reliable cloud environment. Furthermore, the comparative analysis shows that the proposed scheme is better than the existing techniques. Thus, this research work successfully provides an effective, optimal, and secure cloud storage system using blockchain technology.