New data integrity scheme employing wavelet-based digital watermarking in cloud environment

The cloud is an on-demand service provided to users through the Internet. Security has become one of the key problems in the cloud because of the increasing number of users. Many challenges in cloud security need to be resolved. This work focuses on data integrity as one of these security challenges because when users remotely save their data in a cloud, they lose their control on them. Many researchers have presented solutions and developed security frameworks. However, to date, no guarantee has been established with regard to the retention of stored data in a cloud. A novel and unique data integrity scheme employing wavelet-based digital watermarking is developed in this paper. A parallel pre-processing technique is presented to obtain metadata by selecting a set of discrete wavelet transform coefficients and then securely embedding them with user´s file data blocks. We employ wavelet-based digital watermarking to produce metadata for the development of a secure scheme of data storage and verification in a cloud. As a result, digital watermarking is a strong technique that effectively prevents stored data from being intercepted and properly detects data tampering. The proposed scheme can support data dynamics because the cloud user needs to manipulate his or her data. This scheme is sufficiently robust to introduce a good starting point for data integrity in the cloud environment.