Privacy-Preserving Public Auditing of Outsourced Cloud Data with Zero Knowledge Proofs

Ughanze, Ikenna Polycarp (2025) Privacy-Preserving Public Auditing of Outsourced Cloud Data with Zero Knowledge Proofs. Masters thesis, Dublin, National College of Ireland.

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Abstract

The growth in the technology of cloud storage has meant that more and more organizations outsource large amounts of data to the cloud for storage, for archival and compliance purposes. This offers cost and scalability benefits but it introduces issues around verifying data integrity and the risk of leaking sensitive during audits by third parties. Past public auditing frameworks rely on interactive challenge-response mechanisms that leak metadata, increase audit latency and are susceptible to man in the middle attacks. This research proposes a non-interactive, privacy preserving public auding framework using Zero-knowledge Scalable Transparent Arguments of Knowledge (zk-STARKS). Using the Winterfell library to generate cryptographic proofs that a data set remains unchanged without revealing the content of the data or structural metadata to the verifier. The frame is deployed using a cloud native architecture, composed of AWS services. Evaluation of a 200MB dataset split into 2mb per block achieved proof and verification times of approx. 900 ms per block, which can be scaled up to larger datasets with limited cloud compute costs. The result confirm that zk-STARKS can be used to implement an efficient, trust less and privacy preserving framework for cold data auditing, detecting tampering of data without the need for a trusted TPA.

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Supervisors:	Name Email Gupta, Punit UNSPECIFIED
Subjects:	T Technology > T Technology (General) > Information Technology > Cloud computing K Law > KDK Republic of Ireland > Data Protection
Divisions:	School of Computing > Master of Science in Cloud Computing
Depositing User:	Ciara O'Brien
Date Deposited:	31 Mar 2026 10:50
Last Modified:	31 Mar 2026 10:50
URI:	https://norma.ncirl.ie/id/eprint/9274

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