Changhee Hahn  Hyunsoo Kown  Daeyeong Kim  Junbeom Hur

Data outsourcing Multi-Factor Authentication hash tree Usability

Recently, there has been an explosive increase in the volume of multimedia data that is available as a result of the development of multimedia technologies. More and more data is becoming available on a variety of web sites, and it has become increasingly cost prohibitive to have a single data server store and process multimedia files locally. Therefore, many service providers have been likely to outsource data to cloud storage to reduce costs. Such behavior raises one serious concern: how can data users be authenticated in a secure and efficient way? The most widely used password-based authentication methods suffer from numerous disadvantages in terms of security. Multi-factor authentication protocols based on a variety of communication channels, such as SMS, biometric, or hardware tokens, may improve security but inevitably reduce usability. To this end, we present a data block-based authentication scheme that is secure and guarantees usability in such a manner where users do nothing more than enter a password. In addition, the proposed scheme can be effectively used to revoke user rights. To the best of our knowledge, our scheme is the first data block-based authentication scheme for outsourced data that is proven to be secure without degradation in usability. An experiment was conducted using the Amazon EC2 cloud service, and the results show that the proposed scheme guarantees a nearly constant time for user authentication.