scholarly journals Privacy enforcement on subscribers data in cloud computing

2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 308-320
Author(s):  
S.A. Akinboro ◽  
U.J. Asanga ◽  
M.O. Abass

Data stored in the cloud are susceptible to an array of threats from hackers. This is because threats, hackers and unauthorized access are not supported by the cloud service providers as implied. This study improves user privacy in the cloud system, using privacy with non-trusted provider (PNTP) on software and platform as a service model. The subscribers encrypt the data using user’s personal Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) symmetric key algorithm and send the encrypted data to the storage pool of the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) via a secure socket layer. The AES performs a second encryption on the data sent to the cloud and generates for the subscriber a key that will be used for decryption of previously stored data. The encryption and decryption keys are managed by the key server and have been hardcoded into the PNTP system. The model was simulated using the Stanford University multimedia dataset and benchmarked with a Privacy with Trusted cloud Provider (PTP) model using encryption time, decryption time and efficiency (brute force hacking) as parameters. Results showed that it took a longer time to access the user files in PNTP than in the PTP system. The brute force hacking took a longer time (almost double) to access data stored on the PNTP system. This will give subscribers a high level of control over their data and increase the adoption of cloud computing by businesses and organizations with highly sensitive information.

2015 ◽  
pp. 2022-2032
Author(s):  
Bina Ramamurthy

In this chapter, the author examines the various approaches taken by the popular cloud providers Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google App Engine (GAE), and Windows Azure (Azure) to secure the cloud. AWS offers Infrastructure as a Service model, GAE is representative of the Software as a Service, and Azure represents the Platform as a Service model. Irrespective of the model, a cloud provider offers a variety of services from a simple large-scale storage service to a complete infrastructure for supporting the operations of a modern business. The author discusses some of the security aspects that a cloud customer must be aware of in selecting a cloud service provider for their needs. This discussion includes the major threats posed by multi-tenancy in the cloud. Another important aspect to consider in the security context is machine virtualization. Securing these services involves a whole range of measures from access-point protection at the client end to securing virtual co-tenants on the same physical machine hosted by a cloud. In this chapter, the author highlights the major offerings of the three cloud service providers mentioned above. She discusses the details of some important security challenges and solutions and illustrates them using screen shots of representative security configurations.


Cloud computing is constantly evolving with innovations. So, the cloud service providers are investing big in finding solutions for the challenges confronted by the business organizations in the ever-changing technological world. However, still, there is a little reluctance among the organizations to ultimately adopt the public cloud because the mission-critical applications and the mission-critical data require high-level security and availability which are questionable in the equally growing hacking technology. The hacker's comfort zone is Internet, and the Internet is the primary medium for communication between enterprises and cloud service providers. So, the cloud service providers come up with a solution called Direct-Cloud which bypasses the internet and establishes a private connection between the enterprise and cloud service provider. The primary objective of this paper is to familiarize the terminology direct-cloud as it makes a massive move in Cloud Computing. So, this paper presents a study that describes direct-cloud, its architecture, benefits, the comparison between different direct-cloud solutions and the guidelines to choose a suitable direct-cloud solution. Also, the terminologies Multi-Cloud and ConnectedCloud are gaining attention among the enterprises to meet the growing needs of the business. Hence the paper further explores the direct-cloud deployment in the multi-cloud and connected-cloud environment


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 27
Author(s):  
Sara Moazzezi Eftekhar ◽  
Witold Suryn

In recent years, we have witnessed a marked rise in the number of cloud service providers with each offering a plethora of cloud services with different objectives. Gaining confidence for cloud technology adoption as well as selecting a suitable cloud service provider, both require a proper evaluation of cloud service trust characteristics. Hence, the evaluation of cloud services before used by the customer is of utmost importance. In this article, we adapt the extracted trust characteristics from both system and software quality standards and cloud computing standards, for evaluating cloud services. Moreover, we derive measures for each trust characteristics to evaluate the trustworthiness of different cloud service providers, and generalize these trust measures for any type of cloud services (e.g. Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Infrastructure as a Service). Our work thereby demonstrates a way to apply generalized trust measures for cloud services and therefore contributes to a better understanding of cloud services to evaluate their quality characteristics. As part of our ongoing research, the results of this study will be used to develop a comprehensive cloud trust model.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lifa Wu ◽  
Shengli Zhou ◽  
Zhenji Zhou ◽  
Zheng Hong ◽  
Kangyu Huang

In the field of cloud computing, most research on identity management has concentrated on protecting user data. However, users typically leave a trail when they access cloud services, and the resulting user traceability can potentially lead to the leakage of sensitive user information. Meanwhile, malicious users can do harm to cloud providers through the use of pseudonyms. To solve these problems, we introduce a reputation mechanism and design a reputation-based identity management model for cloud computing. In the model, pseudonyms are generated based on a reputation signature so as to guarantee the untraceability of pseudonyms, and a mechanism that calculates user reputation is proposed, which helps cloud service providers to identify malicious users. Analysis verifies that the model can ensure that users access cloud services anonymously and that cloud providers assess the credibility of users effectively without violating user privacy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. V. Pradeep ◽  
V. Vijayakumar ◽  
V. Subramaniyaswamy

Cloud computing is a platform to share the data and resources used among various organizations, but the survey shows that there is always a security threat. Security is an important aspect of cloud computing. Hence, the responsibility underlines to the cloud service providers for providing security as the quality of service. However, cloud computing has many challenges in security that have not yet been addressed well. The data accessed or shared through any devices from the cloud environment are not safe because they are likely to have various attacks like Identity Access Management (IAM), hijacking an account or a service either by internal/external intruders. The cryptography places a major role to secure the data within the cloud environment. Therefore, there is a need for standard encryption/decryption mechanism to protect the data stored in the cloud, in which key is the mandatory element. Every cloud provider has its own security mechanisms to protect the key. The client cannot trust the service provider completely in spite of the fact that, at any instant, the provider has full access to both data and key. In this paper, we have proposed a new system which can prevent the exposure of the key as well as a framework for sharing a file that will ensure security (CIA) using asymmetric key and distributing it within the cloud environment using a trusted third party. We have compared RSA with ElGamal and Paillier in our proposed framework and found RSA gives a better result.


Author(s):  
Waseem Mohammad Maamoun Al-Sbaiti, Maher Abdulrahman Abbas,  Waseem Mohammad Maamoun Al-Sbaiti, Maher Abdulrahman Abbas, 

Investigations and digital evidence have become an important and critical discipline that has made many researchers devote vigorous efforts to developing digital surveillance and investigation mechanisms, especially after the great expansion of the technical infrastructure on cloud computing platforms, which added more challenges to digital investigation. So far, no robust model has been found for preserving and exchanging digital evidence between clouds and users without this model causing a breach of user privacy or affecting performance. Most of the current studies on digital evidence exchange mechanisms rely at one stage of the exchange or evidence formation process on the CSP, which allows the cloud provider (or a malicious employee within the cloud provider) to manipulate the evidence or data. This research will present a proposal for a mechanism for sharing and preserving digital evidence between the cloud parties, taking into account the performance in the major cloud computing models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS), and how this model can achieve evidence integrity and a less level of interference in the privacy of the user as well as the cloud service provider considering that may be more than one party accused as forgery. To achieve this, we have selected some digital evidence that digital investigators can rely on as digital forensic evidence in cases related to information crimes as a sample that can be exchanged and verified that none of them has tampered with this evidence, especially since cloud environments may go beyond having a single cloud that performs the service and thus there are several clouds involved in forming evidence, then we tested this mechanism by applying the SHA-2 Hashing process to digital evidence, then encrypting the output with the Elliptic Curve Cryptography algorithm and measuring the time needed to exchange and verify the evidence. We will compare the proposed model with models in previous studies to illustrate how the proposed model overcame the problem of relying on one party to form the evidence with the least impact for all parties on the level of performance or privacy, and how distributed SHA-2 hashing values proved its effectiveness in the inability of any party to deny the evidence or tamer it.


Author(s):  
J. Craig Mudge

Cloud computing is a mode of acquisition of infrastructure where a cloud service provides on demand computing and on-demand storage, accessible over the web, with a matching business model, namely pay-per-use. Lower cost, sometimes a factor of five, is achieved by automating operations in warehouse-sized data centres, sharing the hefty burden of cooling, physical security, and power backup, and the use of commodity components. As access to storage managed by cloud service providers gained market acceptance, the phrase “the cloud” came into use to refer to the location of information stored with a cloud service provider to be shared (business documents and photos) or copied for backup (against losing a phone or deleting information on a laptop).  Security, and to a lesser extent privacy, concerns are the major barriers to the adoption of cloud computing, but the leading cloud service providers have responded to the point that sensitive information, such as medical records and credit-card-holder data, is now held in the cloud. 


Author(s):  
Aparna Vijaya ◽  
Neelanarayanan V

<p class="Abstract">Cloud Computing is an evolving technology as it offers significant benefits like pay only for what you use, scale the resources according to the needs and less in-house staff and resources. These benefits have resulted in tremendous increase in the number of applications and services hosted in the cloud which inturn has resulted in increase in the number of cloud providers in the market. Cloud service providers have a lot of heterogeneity in the resources they use. They have their own servers, different cloud infrastructures, API’s and methods to access the cloud resources. Despite its benefits; lack of standards among service providers has caused a high level of vendor lock-in when a software developer tries to change its cloud provider. In this paper we give an overview on the ongoing and current trends in the area of cloud service portability and we also propose a new cloud portability platform. Our new platform is based on establishing feature models which offers the desired cloud portability. Our solution DSkyL uses feature models and domain model analysis to support development, customization and deployment of application components across multiple clouds. The main goal of our approach is to reduce the effort and time needed for porting applications across different clouds. This paper aims to give an overview on DSkyL.</p>


Author(s):  
Bina Ramamurthy

In this chapter, the author examines the various approaches taken by the popular cloud providers Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google App Engine (GAE), and Windows Azure (Azure) to secure the cloud. AWS offers Infrastructure as a Service model, GAE is representative of the Software as a Service, and Azure represents the Platform as a Service model. Irrespective of the model, a cloud provider offers a variety of services from a simple large-scale storage service to a complete infrastructure for supporting the operations of a modern business. The author discusses some of the security aspects that a cloud customer must be aware of in selecting a cloud service provider for their needs. This discussion includes the major threats posed by multi-tenancy in the cloud. Another important aspect to consider in the security context is machine virtualization. Securing these services involves a whole range of measures from access-point protection at the client end to securing virtual co-tenants on the same physical machine hosted by a cloud. In this chapter, the author highlights the major offerings of the three cloud service providers mentioned above. She discusses the details of some important security challenges and solutions and illustrates them using screen shots of representative security configurations.


2016 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 173-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela J. Schmidt ◽  
Jason T. Wood ◽  
Severin V. Grabski

ABSTRACTCloud computing services are finding rapid adoption as organizations seek cost reduction, technical expertise, flexibility, and adaptable mechanisms to attain advantages in fast-moving business environments. The related considerations of governance, audit, and assurance of cloud computing services might be inadvertently overlooked in a rush to adopt these cloud services. This paper focuses on cloud computing governance and audit issues by presenting research questions informed by both practice and research. A cloud computing ecosystem is presented and an IT Governance framework (Wilkin and Chenhall 2010) is referenced as a means to structure research questions. Key issues of risk, security, monitoring, control, and compliance should be considered early in the cloud services decision process. The tight coupling of intercompany operations between the cloud client and cloud provider(s) forms an interdependent, operationally coupled ecosystem. Planned governance is needed to achieve a well-governed, functional, and secure cloud computing environment. The audit role is complicated when the organization's financial data and/or critical applications are hosted externally with a cloud service provider that may use other cloud service providers.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document