Anonymous Integrity Auditing Scheme Based on Trusted Execution Environment for Distributed Edge Computing

Multi-replica data storage is widely adopted in edge computing to improve both data availability and access efficiency for latency-sensitive applications. Integrity auditing is a critical mechanism for ensuring data reliability in this distributed setting. However, existing schemes face a trade-off between security and efficiency: ensuring replica authenticity typically requires users to generate unique tags for all copies, creating a bottleneck for resource-constrained devices. Delegation schemes reduce this burden but struggle to prevent collusion or on-the-fly generation attacks. Therefore, this study proposes ATRIA to resolve this dilemma. Uniquely, ATRIA leverages the Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) not only for isolation but to securely offload the intensive replica tag generation from the user, ensuring authentic physical storage with minimal user overhead. By leveraging the hardware isolation of the TEEs, this mechanism ensures authentic physical storage and protects against on-the-fly and collusion attacks. In addition, the scheme incorporates a privacy-preserving identity management solution that balances anonymity and traceability. It employs a traceable anonymous identity mechanism whereby users interact via pseudonyms, hiding their real identities while allowing a trusted Key Generation Center (KGC) to perform identity tracing only when authorized. Our security analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme achieves its security objectives and resists various attacks. Furthermore, a comprehensive performance evaluation demonstrates that ATRIA outperforms related schemes in terms of computational overhead.