Proof Of Data Possession Protocol With Hash-based Deterministic Challenges And Privately Verifiable Payments

Abstract

The research presents a novel protocol for remote verification of data outsourced to a third-party
storage. The protocol aims to verify the possession of data in potentially untrusted storage without
downloading. We identified challenges in existing proof-of-possession protocols (PDP) by conducting
a comprehensive literature review. We stated the optimal threshold for the minimal communication
cost needed in existing PDP protocols to ensure the validity of the target percentage of data blocks
while maintaining high confidence. Building on these findings, we propose our own PDP requires a
fixed amount of communication and offers practically deterministic validity guarantees based on the
security of cryptographic hash functions. We show a scenario for monetization in both cloud-native
and blockchain environments to incentivize storage providers. A rigorous security analysis
demonstrates resilience against forgery attacks aimed to falsify integrity checks or compromise
verifiability assumptions. Our protocol significantly reduces communication overhead compared to
existing solutions while eliminating the cheating probability to negligible levels.