Cloud Storage Assured Deletion: Considerations and Schemes

The assured deletion problem was realized with the introduction of cloud data storage. An exemplar of the broader set of cloud services, assured deletion is poorly understood by customers and complicates the work of forensic professionals. Over the last ten years, schemes that solve the assured deletion problem have been proposed. Proposed solutions have improved on each other to mitigate scaling overhead, trusted third parties, bottlenecks, single points of failure, and other inefficiencies. Cloud service providers have an opportunity to provide customers verifiable proof of deletion. In this work, we focus on the problem of how cloud data storage customers can be assured that when they attempt to delete data from the cloud, it is not retrievable. Just as CSP’s offer technologies that simplify storage operations, providing an assured deletion service could serve as a differentiator.