  Although wide-scale integration of cloud services with myriad applications
increases quality of services (QoS) for enterprise users, verifying the
existence and manipulation of stored cloud information remains an open research
problem. Decentralized blockchain-based solutions are becoming more appealing
for cloud auditing environments because of the immutable nature of blockchain.
However, the decentralized structure of blockchain results in considerable
synchronization and communication overhead, which increases maintenance costs
for cloud service providers (CSP). This paper proposes a Merkle Hash Tree based
architecture named Entangled Merkle Forest to support version control and
dynamic auditing of information in centralized cloud environments. We utilized
a semi-trusted third-party auditor to conduct the auditing tasks with minimal
privacy-preserving file metadata. To the best of our knowledge, we are the
first to design a node sharing Merkle Forest to offer a cost-effective auditing
framework for centralized cloud infrastructures while achieving the immutable
feature of blockchain, mitigating the synchronization and performance
challenges of the decentralized architectures. Our proposed scheme outperforms
it's equivalent Blockchain-based schemes by ensuring time and storage
efficiency with minimum overhead as evidenced by performance analysis.
