provable-data-possession · research · also PDP

Provable data possession

Provable data possession is a challenge-response method for checking whether an untrusted storage service retains specified data without retrieving the entire file.

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. [1]

The 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. [3]

Relations

related

proof-of-retrievability, proof-of-ownership, backup-verification, data-scrubbing

Citations

1. Ateniese et al. Provable Data Possession at Untrusted Stores. CCS 2007, sections 2, 4.3, 5.1. (accessed 2026-10-18)
3. Ateniese et al. Cryptology ePrint 2007/202: revision note on the October 2007 public-verifiability proof correction. (accessed 2026-10-18)

Further reading

2. Hesela: Encrypted deduplication, ownership proofs and remote storage audit boundaries (accessed 2026-10-18)

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