Improving Security and Reliability in Merkle Tree-Based Online Data Authentication with Leakage Resilience

Abstract

With the successful proliferation of data outsourcing services, security and privacy issues have drawn significant attention. Data authentication in particular plays an essential role in the storage of outsourced digital content and keeping it safe from modifications by inside or outside adversaries. In this paper, we focus on online data authentication using a Merkle (hash) tree to guarantee data integrity. By conducting in-depth diagnostics of the side channels of the Merkle tree-based approach, we explore novel solutions to improve the security and reliability of the maintenance of outsourced data. Based on a thorough review of previous solutions, we present a new method of inserting auxiliary random sources into the integrity verification proof on the prover side. This prevents the exposure of partial information within the tree structure and consequently releases restrictions on the number of verification execution, while maintaining desirable security and reliability of authentication for the long run. Based on a rigorous proof, we show that the proposed scheme maintains consistent reliability without being affected by continuous information leakage caused by repetitions of the authentication process. In addition, experimental results comparing with the proposed scheme with other state-of-the-art studies demonstrate its efficiency and practicality.