External integrity verification for outsourced big data in cloud and IoT: A big picture

•Security of Big Data in cloud and IoT is becoming a major problem.•Efficient external integrity verification is an important part of data security.•We provide a big picture through summarizing and analysis of the main results of external integrity verification schemes for big data in cloud.

As cloud computing is being widely adopted for big data processing, data security is becoming one of the major concerns of data owners. Data integrity is an important factor in almost any data and computation related context. It is not only one of the qualities of service, but also an important part of data security and privacy. With the proliferation of cloud computing and the increasing needs in analytics for big data such as data generated by the Internet of Things, verification of data integrity becomes increasingly important, especially on outsourced data. Therefore, research topics on external data integrity verification have attracted tremendous research interest in recent years. Among all the metrics, efficiency and security are two of the most concerned measurements. In this paper, we will bring forth a big picture through providing an analysis on authenticator-based data integrity verification techniques on cloud and Internet of Things data. We will analyze multiple aspects of the research problem. First, we illustrate the research problem by summarizing research motivations and methodologies. Second, we summarize and compare current achievements of several of the representative approaches. Finally, we introduce our view for possible future developments.