Accountable proof of ownership for data using timing element in cloud services

While many cloud storage and infrastructure systems exist today, none of them provide a mechanism for accountability of stored or user generated content. This lack of security support has been a major hurdle for auditing documents, claiming data possession, and proof of authorship. In this paper, we present a novel idea for secure accountability of timing element for data in massively scalable systems. The proposed scheme allows a service provider to incorporate timing accountability of data generated at the provider, by requesting proofs from accountability servers in the cloud. Additionally, the size of the proof is independent of the data size and is a unique feature of our system design. The scalability of the system have been evaluated using the Amazon EC2.