The Scientific Temper (2023) Vol.

14 (3): 806-810 E-ISSN: 2231-6396, ISSN: 0976-8653

Doi: 10.58414/SCIENTIFICTEMPER.2023.14.3.37 https://scientifictemper.com/

RESEARCH ARTICLE

An implementation of secure storage using blockchain

technology on cloud environment
I. Bhuvaneshwarri*, M. N. Sudha

Abstract
Data generation and consumption have significantly increased recently, necessitating the need for secure and dependable file storage
solutions. The vulnerability of current centralized storage solutions to data breaches and hackers compromises the security and
integrity of user data. These problems may have a workable solution in a decentralized file storage system. In order to offer a secure
and dependable storage solution, this paper proposes a blockchain-based file storage (BBFS) system that takes advantage of features
like immutability, transparency, and security. Any user can upload unlimited files (one at a time) with this proposed system. Users can
download and access those files on their machines as well as all other peers. As soon as a peer uploads a file, it is placed in a block
along with the user name, file size, and file information. It is not possible to change or remove these blocks because they are added
to the current blockchain. These blocks can be connected with cloud storage, giving users a safe place to store and access their files
that cannot be altered. By integrating this proposed system with cloud storage, customers can take advantage of the scalability and
security of cloud services as well as the immutability and security of blockchain. The proposed system addresses the cost and scalability
problems that make to be widely applicable.
Keywords: Blockchain technology, Cloud environment, Implementation, Secure storage.

Introduction take advantage of blockchain’s decentralized and tamper-

Blockchain technology has gained traction across a number proof features while storing and accessing files safely and
of sectors, and file storage is one of its most exciting potential conveniently in the cloud. Businesses and people who
uses. It is possible to build a more reliable, decentralized, and need to keep sensitive information, such as bank records,
effective method for storing and sharing data by merging contracts, and intellectual property, may find this to be
blockchain with cloud storage. Files are kept on centralized particularly helpful. In general, cloud-based and blockchain-
servers by traditional cloud storage providers, which makes based file storage has the potential to completely change
them susceptible to downtime, hacking, and data breaches. the way of distributing and saving data. The set of nodes is
The distribution of files across a network of computers via used to store data and do transactions in a decentralized
BBFS, in contrast, makes it far more difficult for hackers manner. Each node has a copy of the blockchain that is
to access and alter the data. Users can take advantage of updated in real-time by a consensus mechanism. As a result,
the positivity of both technologies by integrating cloud- it is almost impossible to change the data or compromise
based file storage with blockchain technology. They may the system without access to the majority of the nodes. The
system that is suggested in this study combines the benefits
Department of Information Technology, Government College of
of both approaches by fusing blockchain technology with
Engineering, Erode, Vasavi College post, Erode, India. cloud storage. Available blockchain-based file storage
*Corresponding Author: I. Bhuvaneshwarri, Department of
choices include Filecoin, Storj, and Sia. Users of these services
Information Technology, Government College of Engineering, use cryptocurrency to pay for storage and bandwidth, and
Erode, Vasavi College post, Erode, India, E-Mail: [email protected] data is stored and retrieved utilizing decentralized networks
How to cite this article: Bhuvaneshwarri, I., Sudha, M.N. (2023). An of nodes. Some cloud service providers, including Microsoft
implementation of secure storage using blockchain technology Azure, are looking into blockchain technology for cloud
on cloud environment. The Scientific Temper, 14(3): 806-810. management and storage. Finally, the suggested approach
Doi: 10.58414/SCIENTIFICTEMPER.2023.14.3.37 to cloud integration with blockchain-based file storage
Source of support: Nil has the potential to revolutionize the access, sharing, and
storage of data.
Conflict of interest: None.

© The Scientific Temper. 2023

Received: 12/07/2023 Accepted: 10/08/2023 Published : 25/09/2023
807 Secure Storage on Cloud Environment

Related Work used to investigate, compare, and assess the state-of-the-art

With the help of the blockchain data structure, digital data is solutions (Cangir et al., 2021).
safely saved. Blockchain is an open ledger that is accessible Li et. al, 2021 have developed secure P2P cloud storage
to multiple people at once. A blockchain is used to store with better reduced transmission delay. Nguyen et al.,
all types of digital data, including transactional data, files, (2019) developed a technique for ensuring data interchange
communications, and more. The consensus method, block reliability on mobile clouds while protecting sensitive health
mining, block validation, and other features are all part of information from potential threats. When compared to
a successful blockchain implementation. Large storage previous data sharing models, the system evaluation and
providers are the only sources of cloud storage. These security analysis show performance gains in lightweight
storage companies handle the data transactions for storing, access control architecture, minimum network latency
sending, and receiving data from an organization as reliable with high security and data privacy levels. The ChainFS
third parties. on Ethereum and fuse based file system, as well as close
According to Bhosale et al. (2019), this type of paradigm integration with FUSE clients and Amazon S3 cloud storage.
raises a variety of difficulties, including high operational The system performance is measured and showed that it
costs, data accessibility, and data security. An open source has a low overhead (Tang et al, 2018). The blockchain based
software project called Metadisk aims to conceptually secure storage system for healthcare system also developed
demonstrate how cloud storage services might be made (Xi et al., 2022).
more efficient, safe, and decentralized. It offers a framework
for the prototyping of a totally decentralized network. Existing System and its Drawbacks
The main goal of Metadisk is to offer a reliable testing The decentralized file storage system stores and retrieves
environment for the Storj peer-to-peer cloud storage files via a network built on the blockchain. Users can charge
network (Wilkinson et al., 2014). Its ultimate goal is to offer others to use their extra storage space. The inter planetary
a collection of tools that will make it simpler for Storj to file system (IPFS), a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol, is
interact with established platforms and users. Before any the foundation for the blockchan platform. This blockchain
data is transferred from a client’s PC to the cloud, it must first based platform provides decentralised file storage. Users
be encrypted, including filename, date, and other metadata. can safely store files on a distributed network of nodes.
Politics or the law cannot be used as a centralized point The software combines erasure coding and end-to-end
of attack. All incentive payments will be automated and encryption to make sure that files are safe and accessible.
made in an anonymous cryptocurrency to both resource Blockchain workbench enables users to create and deploy
producers and consumers. It’s time for the cloud to fully blockchain applications, and it enables users to store and
materialize as a collection of countless resource droplets manage files on the blockchain. Other cloud services like
that are continuously added to and removed from as the Azure Storage and Azure Functions can be linked with
cloud moves and changes shape. The amount of data kept these solutions. In this paper, file of information is created
in computer settings has dramatically grown in recent years. in blockchain, enabling users to upload or download any
Due to the volume expansion, it has become exceedingly sort of file via a publicly accessible website. It ensures that
challenging to store and handle a lot of data on a single the block is kept secret by using the SHA256 cryptographic
server. Distributed storage technologies are being employed technique. Proof of work is used as a consensus technique,
to fix issues with scalability and high availability on a requiring miners to crack any cryptographic conundrum
single server. Utilizing related administrative techniques, before they can publish a new block on the chain. In the
distributed storage solutions advance the handling and proposed application, to solve a challenge by finding a
serving of data over several nodes. Later, new storage hash value that begins with three 0s. Finding the most
infrastructures were created by implementing distributed appropriate system requires investigation and comparison
storage strategies on fresh blockchain technology. of the many features and pricing structures offered by these
However, a framework for analysing solutions that use systems. The shortcomings of the current system are,
this novel distributed blockchain technology is lacking in • Running time of the insertion and other block-operations
the literature. To the best of our knowledge, we outline can be slow because it holds too much data to process;
the first classification and taxonomy of blockchain-based • It is expensive and takes more resources to maintain.
distributed storage technologies in this article. In addition, • In this case, off-chain blockchain can be used to address
if the network or any of the storage nodes fail, it will have on-chain blockchain problems.
an impact on the entire architecture. As a result, the single
point of failure issue may affect the entire NAS network in Proposed System
which the storage nodes are situated. Other cloud services like Azure storage and Azure functions
Due to NAS nodes’ poor failure tolerance, the storage can be linked with these solutions. In this paper, a file is
infrastructure is insufficient. The proposed taxonomy is created as a block in a blockchain as part of this paper,
808 I. Bhuvaneshwarri et al. The Scientific Temper. Vol. 14, No. 3

enabling users to upload or download any sort of file via a

publicly accessible website. It ensures that the block is kept
secret by using the SHA256 cryptographic technique. Proof
of work is used as a consensus technique, requiring miners
to crack any cryptographic conundrum before they can
publish a new block on the chain. In this paper, to solve a
challenge by finding a hash value that begins with three 0s.
Finding the most appropriate system requires investigation
and comparison of the many features and pricing structures
offered by these systems. The cloud storage system must
provide the infrastructure for the system’s storage. Any cloud
storage service, including Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, and
Figure 1: System architecture of the proposed system
Google Cloud Storage, can be incorporated into the system’s
Sources: “Proposed Model for Secured Data Storage in Decentralized Cloud by
design. The system gains advantages in terms of scalability, Blockchain Ethereum” by Nabeel Khan, Hana Aljoaey, Mujahid Tabassum, Ali Farzamnia,
dependability, and performance with the incorporation of Tripti Sharma and Yew Hoe Tung in MDPI
cloud technologies. The user produces a transaction that
includes the file hash and metadata like the file name, size, • Then the storage provider provides proof of integrity
and type in to upload a file to the system. The transaction to the user.
is subsequently broadcast to all network nodes for • The user pays the storage fee to the storage provider
confirmation and verification. The file is encrypted and sent through lightning.
to the cloud storage server after confirming the transaction. • Finally, the user writes the information securely onto the
The file encryption key is kept on the blockchain network blockchain blocks.
to maintain its security. The following are some benefits of
the suggested system: Procedural Diagram
• Information is contained in safe blocks, which can The procedural steps in the proposed system is depicted in
increase the security of on-chain blockchain. the Figure 2 are as follows:
• Information can be easily restored in the event of a • Initially, the user chooses a blockchain platform.
system breakdown. • The user develop a user interface.
• More dependable and usable. • Creation of a smart contract.
• The user performs authentication and authorization.
System Specification • Integration with the cloud environment.
Hardware refers to the actual parts of the computer, such • The user creates the blockchain and upload the files in
as the motherboard, hard drives, RAM, and processor. The the blockchain.
executors of the commands given by software programmes • The files created are stored under the blocks.
are hardware devices. • Upload the blocks into the cloud.
Platform : Windows 10, Windows 11 • Implement encryption and access control.
Processor : INTEL • Test and deploy the proposed system.
Pentium RAM Capacity : 8 GB
RAM Hard disk : 50 GB
The software requirements are: Flask,Numpy,Requests and
Werkzeug.
System Architecture
The entire system architecture has the following steps
(Figure 1):
• User initially send the request for apply for admission
to the middleman.
• Based on the user’s admission request, the middleman
sends the agreement to admission.
• The next step is the user to send the encrypted data to
the middleman.
• The middleman distributes the file data blocks to each
storage user.
• The user then issues an integrity challenge to the storage
provider. Figure 2: Procedural steps in the propsosed system
809 Secure Storage on Cloud Environment

Table 1: Comparison between traditional and blockchain based application programming interface (API) for native apps
secure storage and feature additions was also built. Financial transactions
Traditional secure storage Blockchain-based secure storage are conducted via cryptocurrency, and trust is established
Belongs to single-ownership Blockchain establishes with more between client and host via cloud storage. A user interface
nodes each owner is different and smart contract are created using blockchain technology.
Mutable in nature Blockchain is immutable in Authentication and authorization ensure the security of file
nature storage. The files are immutable and are written beneath the
External security mechanisms Built in secure system blocks. The blocks are then added to the blockchain and
are used to provide security
to storage
There is no link between There is link between previous
previous block of storage with block of storage with current
current block block through hash values
Nonce value is not used Nonce value is used

Comparison between Storage Systems

The comparison between traditional storage system and
blockchain based secure storage system is given in the
Table 1. Figure 4: User interface for uploading a file

Results and Discussion

The suggested solution in this research employs blockchain
technology to provide secure distributed data storage. The
system enables the user to upload data via the IPFS, which
distributes data content to cloud nodes at the global level
network and ensures data availability by retrieving data
files via Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) based on the
hash values of the files uploaded to IPFS. As a result, only
the person with the hash value of the data uploaded to the
IPFS network can access the file. The suggested solution
protects data privacy by assuring the immutability of the Figure 5: Select file for uploading
blockchain and storing it on a distributed global network.
The speed of accessing data from traditional secure storage
versus blockchain with 5 nodes is depicted in Figure 3.
Figure 3 shows that the accessing speed of the blockchain
with 5 distributed nodes outperforms the traditional
secure storage. The proposed system is built with smart
contracts, Ganache Blockchain was tested on the Ethereum
blockchain platform. A web application that provides an
interface for non-technical users as well as an underlying

Figure 6: Select files for downloading

Figure 3: Accessing speed of data from traditional versus secure

blockchain storage Figure 7: Display file content after downloading
810 I. Bhuvaneshwarri et al. The Scientific Temper. Vol. 14, No. 3

uploaded to the cloud. After completing the authentication integrated with other blockchain applications such as smart
and authorization mechanism, the user wishes to download contracts, digital identity management, and supply chain
files from the cloud. The sample output screenshots are management. Future work could focus on exploring the
given in Figures 4 to 7. potential benefits of such integrations.

Conclusions and Future Work Acknowledgment

The proposed system demonstrated the feasibility of using We are thankful to the management for conducting this
blockchain technology for secure and decentralized file collaborative study.
storage. Compared to traditional centralized file storage
solutions, the system provides several benefits, including References
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