State of The Art and Hot Aspects in Cloud Data Storage Security

Along with the evolution of cloud computing and cloud storage towards matu- rity, researchers have analyzed an increasing range of cloud computing security aspects, data security being an important topic in this area. In this paper, we examine the state of the art in cloud storage security through an overview of selected peer reviewed publications. We address the question of defining cloud storage security and its different aspects, as well as enumerate the main vec- tors of attack on cloud storage. The reviewed papers present techniques for key management and controlled disclosure of encrypted data in cloud storage, while novel ideas regarding secure operations on encrypted data and methods for pro- tection of data in fully virtualized environments provide a glimpse of the toolbox available for securing cloud storage. Finally, new challenges such as emergent government regulation call for solutions to problems that did not receive enough attention in earlier stages of cloud computing, such as for example geographical location of data. The methods presented in the papers selected for this review represent only a small fraction of the wide research effort within cloud storage security. Nevertheless, they serve as an indication of the diversity of problems that are being addressed

A comprehensive meta-analysis of cryptographic security mechanisms for cloud computing

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.The concept of cloud computing offers measurable computational or information resources as a service over the Internet. The major motivation behind the cloud setup is economic benefits, because it assures the reduction in expenditure for operational and infrastructural purposes. To transform it into a reality there are some impediments and hurdles which are required to be tackled, most profound of which are security, privacy and reliability issues. As the user data is revealed to the cloud, it departs the protection-sphere of the data owner. However, this brings partly new security and privacy concerns. This work focuses on these issues related to various cloud services and deployment models by spotlighting their major challenges. While the classical cryptography is an ancient discipline, modern cryptography, which has been mostly developed in the last few decades, is the subject of study which needs to be implemented so as to ensure strong security and privacy mechanisms in today’s real-world scenarios. The technological solutions, short and long term research goals of the cloud security will be described and addressed using various classical cryptographic mechanisms as well as modern ones. This work explores the new directions in cloud computing security, while highlighting the correct selection of these fundamental technologies from cryptographic point of view

Secure data sharing and processing in heterogeneous clouds

The extensive cloud adoption among the European Public Sector Players empowered them to own and operate a range of cloud infrastructures. These deployments vary both in the size and capabilities, as well as in the range of employed technologies and processes. The public sector, however, lacks the necessary technology to enable effective, interoperable and secure integration of a multitude of its computing clouds and services. In this work we focus on the federation of private clouds and the approaches that enable secure data sharing and processing among the collaborating infrastructures and services of public entities. We investigate the aspects of access control, data and security policy languages, as well as cryptographic approaches that enable fine-grained security and data processing in semi-trusted environments. We identify the main challenges and frame the future work that serve as an enabler of interoperability among heterogeneous infrastructures and services. Our goal is to enable both security and legal conformance as well as to facilitate transparency, privacy and effectivity of private cloud federations for the public sector needs. © 2015 The Authors

SGXIO: Generic Trusted I/O Path for Intel SGX

Application security traditionally strongly relies upon security of the underlying operating system. However, operating systems often fall victim to software attacks, compromising security of applications as well. To overcome this dependency, Intel introduced SGX, which allows to protect application code against a subverted or malicious OS by running it in a hardware-protected enclave. However, SGX lacks support for generic trusted I/O paths to protect user input and output between enclaves and I/O devices. This work presents SGXIO, a generic trusted path architecture for SGX, allowing user applications to run securely on top of an untrusted OS, while at the same time supporting trusted paths to generic I/O devices. To achieve this, SGXIO combines the benefits of SGX's easy programming model with traditional hypervisor-based trusted path architectures. Moreover, SGXIO can tweak insecure debug enclaves to behave like secure production enclaves. SGXIO surpasses traditional use cases in cloud computing and makes SGX technology usable for protecting user-centric, local applications against kernel-level keyloggers and likewise. It is compatible to unmodified operating systems and works on a modern commodity notebook out of the box. Hence, SGXIO is particularly promising for the broad x86 community to which SGX is readily available.Comment: To appear in CODASPY'1

Flexible Yet Secure De-Duplication Service for Enterprise Data on Cloud Storage

The cloud storage services bring forth infinite storage capacity and flexible access capability to store and share large-scale content. The convenience brought forth has attracted both individual and enterprise users to outsource data service to a cloud provider. As the survey shows 56% of the usages of cloud storage applications are for data back up and up to 68% of data backup are user assets. Enterprise tenants would need to protect their data privacy before uploading them to the cloud and expect a reasonable performance while they try to reduce the operation cost in terms of cloud storage, capacity and I/Os matter as well as systems’ performance, bandwidth and data protection. Thus, enterprise tenants demand secure and economic data storage yet flexible access on their cloud data. In this paper, we propose a secure de-duplication solution for enterprise tenants to leverage the benefits of cloud storage while reducing operation cost and protecting privacy. First, the solution uses a proxy to do flexible group access control which supports secure de-duplication within a group; Second, the solution supports scalable clustering of proxies to support large-scale data access; Third, the solution can be integrated with cloud storage seamlessly. We implemented and tested our solution by integrating it with Dropbox. Secure de-duplication in a group is performed at low data transfer latency and small storage overhead as compared to de-duplication on plaintext

Cloud Computing in the Quantum Era

Cloud computing has become the prominent technology of this era. Its elasticity, dynamicity, availability, heterogeneity, and pay as you go pricing model has attracted several companies to migrate their businesses' services into the cloud. This gives them more time to focus solely on their businesses and reduces the management and backup overhead leveraging the flexibility of cloud computing. On the other hand, quantum technology is developing very rapidly. Experts are expecting to get an efficient quantum computer within the next decade. This has a significant impact on several sciences including cryptography, medical research, and other fields. This paper analyses the reciprocal impact of quantum technology on cloud computing and vice versa