{
  "slug": "provable-data-possession",
  "term": "Provable data possession",
  "aliases": [
    "PDP"
  ],
  "definition": "Provable data possession is a challenge-response method for checking whether an untrusted storage service retains specified data without retrieving the entire file.",
  "note": "Ateniese and colleagues use random block sampling and homomorphic verifiable tags; their S-PDP and E-PDP variants have different guarantees. Specify the construction and sampling assumptions instead of treating PDP as a universal full-recovery promise. [pdp2007]\n\nThe authors' October 2007 revision corrected the public-verifiability proof and restricted block size. Consult the revised construction before reasoning about that property; a sampling hit probability is not implementation validation. [pdp2007-correction]",
  "related": [
    "proof-of-retrievability",
    "proof-of-ownership",
    "backup-verification",
    "data-scrubbing"
  ],
  "citations": [
    {
      "id": "pdp2007",
      "title": "Ateniese et al. Provable Data Possession at Untrusted Stores. CCS 2007, sections 2, 4.3, 5.1.",
      "url": "https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~dawnsong/papers/p598-ateniese",
      "accessed": "2026-10-18"
    },
    {
      "id": "hesela-storage-proofs",
      "title": "Hesela: Encrypted deduplication, ownership proofs and remote storage audit boundaries",
      "url": "https://hesela.com/analyses/encrypted-deduplication-trust-boundaries/#storage-proofs",
      "accessed": "2026-10-18"
    },
    {
      "id": "pdp2007-correction",
      "title": "Ateniese et al. Cryptology ePrint 2007/202: revision note on the October 2007 public-verifiability proof correction.",
      "url": "https://eprint.iacr.org/2007/202",
      "accessed": "2026-10-18"
    }
  ],
  "status": "research",
  "advantages": [],
  "limitations": [],
  "supersedes": [],
  "supersededBy": [],
  "firstSeen": null,
  "lastSeen": null,
  "updated": "2026-10-18"
}