Xiaoyuan Qin

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In ESORICS’16, Xu et al. introduced a new notion called delegatable proofs of storage (delegatable POS, DPOS), which strikes a balance between privately verifiable POS (PriPOS) and publicly verifiable POS (PubPOS). Their scheme offers efficiency similar to PriPOS while allowing third-party auditors to verify file integrity, with auditors being revocable and replaceable, thus approximating PubPOS. Later in 2018, Yang et al. enhanced the scheme with data dynamic and privacy-preserving features. However, the scheme’s design is intricate, introduces new hardness assumptions, and has the potential for improved computational efficiency. Our work explores the connections between PriPOS and DPOS, proposing a generic construction that could construct DPOS schemes directly from PriPOS ones. Our generic construction removes the need for new designs or additional assumptions, retains PriPOS’s efficiency, and avoids the overhead of re-downloading files. We formally prove the security of our generic construction and showcase it by instantiating a DPOS scheme based on a classical PriPOS scheme, which concretely shows key advantages. The proposed scheme uses standard primitives like pseudo-random functions, avoids costly pairings, and optimizes computational and communication costs. Furthermore, our generic construction seamlessly accommodates the extension of DPOS schemes to incorporate advanced features. Specifically, we enhance the base DPOS scheme with random masks to achieve a privacy-preserving DPOS scheme and integrate Index Management Tree (IMT) to develop a dynamic DPOS scheme, which reduces update complexity to O ( log n ) .