With the rapid growth of cloud computing technology, more and more users store and share their data through cloud storage. Major concern is the inadvertent exposure of sensitive data of potential cloud users. Sometimes the cloud server may not delete the data honestly for financial intensives so that data deletion becomes a security challenge. Sometimes unintended disclosure leads to heavy financial penalties and reputational damage. The traditional approach to this problem is encryption of the data before outsourcing and destruction of the encryption key when detecting. Moreover, most of the existing methods can be summarized with the one-bit-return protocol. In which, cloud storage server deletes the data and returns one-bit as a result either 0 or 1 means failure/success. Sometimes this result misguides the user, but user has to believe the returned result because user can not verify it. As userslose their direct control over their data in cloud storage. Hence, assured data deletion is highly required in cloudstorage. In this paper, we aim to analyze assured deletion methods for the cloud, identifying the cloud features that pose a threat to assured deletion and described various assured deletion challenges.

Assured data deletion, User assurance, Cloud storage, Cloud security

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