Jurnal RESTI (Rekayasa Sistem dan Teknologi Informasi)
Vol 10 No 4 (2026): August 2026 (in progress)

Efficient Assured Cloud Data Deletion and Verification Scheme Using AES-XOR Encryption and Merkle Trees

Huda Sharaf Eldin Shakur (Kirkuk University)
Baban Ahmed Mahmood (Kirkuk University)



Article Info

Publish Date
19 Aug 2026

Abstract

With the increasing interest of cloud computing users in storing and processing their data, the need for secure and permanent data deletion has grown. This research paper proposes a practical, evaluable, and testable mechanism for verifying data integrity and ensuring its deletion. The proposed system integrates sequential XOR technology with AES-based block-level encryption, thereby achieving strong interconnection between encrypted blocks. This prevents block separation, decryption, or tampering during transmission and storage. The encryption key is divided into independent parts, the purpose of which is to prevent any single party from possessing the complete encryption key. This ensures that the file cannot be recovered if any part of the key is deleted. The encrypted blocks are then arranged with one of the key parts in a Merkel tree structure to guarantee data integrity and verifiability during storage and retrieval. Through experimentation and providing similar levels of confidentiality and data recovery, the experimental results showed that this mechanism achieves competitive computing efficiency with reasonable storage and communication costs compared to basic methods. This solution was implemented on a real cloud platform within the Microsoft Azure environment, proving its feasibility, security and reliability without the need for major modifications to the existing cloud infrastructure.

Copyrights © 2026






Journal Info

Abbrev

RESTI

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT Engineering

Description

Jurnal RESTI (Rekayasa Sistem dan Teknologi Informasi) dimaksudkan sebagai media kajian ilmiah hasil penelitian, pemikiran dan kajian analisis-kritis mengenai penelitian Rekayasa Sistem, Teknik Informatika/Teknologi Informasi, Manajemen Informatika dan Sistem Informasi. Sebagai bagian dari semangat ...