Technical Report on Deploying a highly secured OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure using BradStack as a Case Study

Cloud computing has emerged as a popular paradigm and an attractive model for providing a reliable distributed computing model.it is increasing attracting huge attention both in academic research and industrial initiatives. Cloud deployments are paramount for institution and organizations of all scales. The availability of a flexible, free open source cloud platform designed with no propriety software and the ability of its integration with legacy systems and third-party applications are fundamental. Open stack is a free and opensource software released under the terms of Apache license with a fragmented and distributed architecture making it highly flexible. This project was initiated and aimed at designing a secured cloud infrastructure called BradStack, which is built on OpenStack in the Computing Laboratory at the University of Bradford. In this report, we present and discuss the steps required in deploying a secured BradStack Multi-node cloud infrastructure and conducting Penetration testing on OpenStack Services to validate the effectiveness of the security controls on the BradStack platform. This report serves as a practical guideline, focusing on security and practical infrastructure related issues. It also serves as a reference for institutions looking at the possibilities of implementing a secured cloud solution.Comment: 38 pages, 19 figures

A Survey on Data Security in Cloud Computing Using Blockchain: Challenges, Existing-State-Of-The-Art Methods, And Future Directions

Cloud computing is one of the ruling storage solutions. However, the cloud computing centralized storage method is not stable. Blockchain, on the other hand, is a decentralized cloud storage system that ensures data security. Cloud environments are vulnerable to several attacks which compromise the basic confidentiality, integrity, availability, and security of the network. This research focus on decentralized, safe data storage, high data availability, and effective use of storage resources. To properly respond to the situation of the blockchain method, we have conducted a comprehensive survey of the most recent and promising blockchain state-of-the-art methods, the P2P network for data dissemination, hash functions for data authentication, and IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) protocol for data integrity. Furthermore, we have discussed a detailed comparison of consensus algorithms of Blockchain concerning security. Also, we have discussed the future of blockchain and cloud computing. The major focus of this study is to secure the data in Cloud computing using blockchain and ease for researchers for further research work