Authors: Jinglin Zou, Debiao He, Sherali Zeadally, Neeraj Kumar, Huaqun Wang, Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo

Title: Integrated Blockchain and Cloud Computing Systems: A Systematic Survey, Solutions, and Challenges

Journal: ACM Computing Surveys

Abstract: Cloud computing is a network model of on-demand access for sharing configurable computing resource pools. Compared with traditional services’ architectures, cloud computing introduces new security challenges in secure service management and control, privacy protection, data integrity protection in distributed databases, data backup, and synchronization. The transparency, traceability, decentralization, security, immutability, and automation of blockchain can be utilized in the cloud computing model to address some of the cloud architectural challenges. We present a comprehensive survey of how blockchain is applied to provide security services in the cloud computing model and we analyze the research trends of blockchain-related techniques in current cloud computing models. During the reviewing, we also briefly investigate how cloud computing can affect blockchain, especially about the performance improvements that cloud computing can provide for the blockchain. Our contributions include: (i) summarizing the possible architectures and models of the integration of blockchain and cloud computing, and the roles of cloud computing in blockchain; (ii) classifying and discussing recent, relevant works based on different blockchain-based security services in the cloud computing model; (iii) simply investigating what improvements cloud computing can provide for the blockchain; (iv) introducing the current development status of the industry/major cloud providers in the direction of combining cloud and blockchain; (v) analyzing the main barriers and challenges of integrated blockchain and cloud computing systems; (vi) providing recommendations for future research and improvement on the integration of blockchain and cloud systems.