Review of the environmental and organisational implications of cloud computing: final report.

Cloud computing – where elastic computing resources are delivered over the Internet by external service providers – is generating significant interest within HE and FE. In the cloud computing business model, organisations or individuals contract with a cloud computing service provider on a pay-per-use basis to access data centres, application software or web services from any location. This provides an elasticity of provision which the customer can scale up or down to meet demand. This form of utility computing potentially opens up a new paradigm in the provision of IT to support administrative and educational functions within HE and FE. Further, the economies of scale and increasingly energy efficient data centre technologies which underpin cloud services means that cloud solutions may also have a positive impact on carbon footprints. In response to the growing interest in cloud computing within UK HE and FE, JISC commissioned the University of Strathclyde to undertake a Review of the Environmental and Organisational Implications of Cloud Computing in Higher and Further Education [19]

A Comprehensive Cloud Security Model with Enhanced Key Management, Access Control and Data Anonymization Features

A disgusting problem in public cloud is to securely share data based on fine grained access control policies and unauthorized key management. Existing approaches to encrypt policies and data with different keys based on public key cryptosystem are Attribute Based Encryption and proxy re-encryption. The weakness behind approaches is: It cannot efficiently handle policy changes and also problem in user revocation and attribute identification.  Even though it is so popular, when employed in cloud it generate high computational and storage cost. More importantly, image encryption is some out complex in case of public key cryptosystem. On the publication of sensitive dataset, it does not preserve privacy of an individual. A direct application of a symmetric key cryptosystem, where users are served based on the policies they satisfy and unique keys are generated by Data Owner (DO). Based on this idea, we formalize a new key management scheme, called Symmetric Chaos Based key Management (SCBKM), and then give a secure construction of a SCBKM scheme called AS-Chaos. The idea is to give some secrets to Key Manager (KM) based on the identity attributes they have and later allow them to derive actual symmetric keys based on their secrets. Using our SCBKM construct, we propose an efficient approach for fine-grained encryption-based access control for data stored in untrusted cloud storage

Decentralized Resource Scheduling in Grid/Cloud Computing

In the Grid/Cloud environment, applications or services and resources belong to different organizations with different objectives. Entities in the Grid/Cloud are autonomous and self-interested; however, they are willing to share their resources and services to achieve their individual and collective goals. In such open environment, the scheduling decision is a challenge given the decentralized nature of the environment. Each entity has specific requirements and objectives that need to achieve. In this thesis, we review the Grid/Cloud computing technologies, environment characteristics and structure and indicate the challenges within the resource scheduling. We capture the Grid/Cloud scheduling model based on the complete requirement of the environment. We further create a mapping between the Grid/Cloud scheduling problem and the combinatorial allocation problem and propose an adequate economic-based optimization model based on the characteristic and the structure nature of the Grid/Cloud. By adequacy, we mean that a comprehensive view of required properties of the Grid/Cloud is captured. We utilize the captured properties and propose a bidding language that is expressive where entities have the ability to specify any set of preferences in the Grid/Cloud and simple as entities have the ability to express structured preferences directly. We propose a winner determination model and mechanism that utilizes the proposed bidding language and finds a scheduling solution. Our proposed approach integrates concepts and principles of mechanism design and classical scheduling theory. Furthermore, we argue that in such open environment privacy concerns by nature is part of the requirement in the Grid/Cloud. Hence, any scheduling decision within the Grid/Cloud computing environment is to incorporate the feasibility of privacy protection of an entity. Each entity has specific requirements in terms of scheduling and privacy preferences. We analyze the privacy problem in the Grid/Cloud computing environment and propose an economic based model and solution architecture that provides a scheduling solution given privacy concerns in the Grid/Cloud. Finally, as a demonstration of the applicability of the approach, we apply our solution by integrating with Globus toolkit (a well adopted tool to enable Grid/Cloud computing environment). We also, created simulation experimental results to capture the economic and time efficiency of the proposed solution