Storage-as-a-Service (SaaS) offered by cloud service providers is a paid facility that enables organizations to outsource their data to be stored on remote servers. Thus, SaaS reduces the maintenance cost and mitigates the burden of large local data storage at the orga-nization’s end. However, the fact that data owners no longer physi-cally possess their sensitive data raises new challenges to the tasks of data confidentiality and integrity in cloud computing systems. Many researchers have focused on the problem of provable data possession (PDP), and proposed different schemes to audit data on remote storage sites. In this paper, we investigate the concept of PDP and provide an extensive survey for different PDP schemes on a single cloud server. Moreover, the paper discusses the design principles for var-ious PDP constructions, highlights some limitations, and present a comparative analysis for numerous PDP models. We classify PDP schemes into protocols for static data, and models that support out-sourcing of dynamic data.

Copyright © 2014 Mehdi Sookhak et al.This is an open access article distributed under the Creative CommonsAttribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Cloud computing is a significant shift of computational paradigmwhere computing as a utility and storing data remotely have a great potential. Enterprise and businesses are nowmore interested in outsourcing their data to the cloud to lessen the burden of local data storage andmaintenance. However, the outsourced data and the computation outcomes are not continuously trustworthy due to the lack of control and physical possession of the data owners. To better streamline this issue, researchers have now focused on designing remote data auditing (RDA) techniques.Themajority of these techniques, however, are only applicable for static archive data and are not subject to audit the dynamically updated outsourced data.We propose an effectual RDA technique based on algebraic signature properties for cloud storage system and also present a new data structure capable of efficiently supporting dynamic data operations like append, insert, modify, and delete. Moreover, this data structure empowers our method to be applicable for large-scale data withminimum computation cost.The comparative analysis with the state-of-the-art RDA schemes shows that the proposed scheme is secure and highly efficient in terms of the computation and communication overhead on the auditor and server. 1.