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

An extensive research survey on data integrity and deduplication towards privacy in cloud storage

Owing to the highly distributed nature of the cloud storage system, it is one of the challenging tasks to incorporate a higher degree of security towards the vulnerable data. Apart from various security concerns, data privacy is still one of the unsolved problems in this regards. The prime reason is that existing approaches of data privacy doesn't offer data integrity and secure data deduplication process at the same time, which is highly essential to ensure a higher degree of resistance against all form of dynamic threats over cloud and internet systems. Therefore, data integrity, as well as data deduplication is such associated phenomena which influence data privacy. Therefore, this manuscript discusses the explicit research contribution toward data integrity, data privacy, and data deduplication. The manuscript also contributes towards highlighting the potential open research issues followed by a discussion of the possible future direction of work towards addressing the existing problems

To Share or Not to Share in Client-Side Encrypted Clouds

With the advent of cloud computing, a number of cloud providers have arisen to provide Storage-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings to both regular consumers and business organizations. SaaS (different than Software-as-a-Service in this context) refers to an architectural model in which a cloud provider provides digital storage on their own infrastructure. Three models exist amongst SaaS providers for protecting the confidentiality data stored in the cloud: 1) no encryption (data is stored in plain text), 2) server-side encryption (data is encrypted once uploaded), and 3) client-side encryption (data is encrypted prior to upload). This paper seeks to identify weaknesses in the third model, as it claims to offer 100% user data confidentiality throughout all data transactions (e.g., upload, download, sharing) through a combination of Network Traffic Analysis, Source Code Decompilation, and Source Code Disassembly. The weaknesses we uncovered primarily center around the fact that the cloud providers we evaluated were each operating in a Certificate Authority capacity to facilitate data sharing. In this capacity, they assume the role of both certificate issuer and certificate authorizer as denoted in a Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI) scheme - which gives them the ability to view user data contradicting their claims of 100% data confidentiality. We have collated our analysis and findings in this paper and explore some potential solutions to address these weaknesses in these sharing methods. The solutions proposed are a combination of best practices associated with the use of PKI and other cryptographic primitives generally accepted for protecting the confidentiality of shared information

SDVADC: Secure Deduplication and Virtual Auditing of Data in Cloud

Over the last few years, deploying data to cloud service for repository is an appealing passion that avoids efforts on significant information sustenance and administration. In distributed repository utilities, deduplication technique is often exploited to minimize the capacity and bandwidth necesseties of amenities by erasing repetitive data and caching only a solitary duplicate of them. Proof-of-Ownership mechanisms authorize any possessor of the identical information to approve to the distributed repository server that he possess the information in a dynamic way. In repository utilities with enormous information, the repository servers may intend to minimize the capacity of cached information, and the customers may want to examine the integrity of their information with a reasonable cost. We propose Secure Deduplication and Virtual Auditing of Data in Cloud (SDVADC) mechanism that realizes integrity auditing and

Survey on securing data storage in the cloud

Cloud Computing has become a well-known primitive nowadays; many researchers and companies are embracing this fascinating technology with feverish haste. In the meantime, security and privacy challenges are brought forward while the number of cloud storage user increases expeditiously. In this work, we conduct an in-depth survey on recent research activities of cloud storage security in association with cloud computing. After an overview of the cloud storage system and its security problem, we focus on the key security requirement triad, i.e., data integrity, data confidentiality, and availability. For each of the three security objectives, we discuss the new unique challenges faced by the cloud storage services, summarize key issues discussed in the current literature, examine, and compare the existing and emerging approaches proposed to meet those new challenges, and point out possible extensions and futuristic research opportunities. The goal of our paper is to provide a state-of-the-art knowledge to new researchers who would like to join this exciting new field

Data Auditing and Security in Cloud Computing: Issues, Challenges and Future Directions

Cloud computing is one of the significant development that utilizes progressive computational power and upgrades data distribution and data storing facilities. With cloud information services, it is essential for information to be saved in the cloud and also distributed across numerous customers. Cloud information repository is involved with issues of information integrity, data security and information access by unapproved users. Hence, an autonomous reviewing and auditing facility is necessary to guarantee that the information is effectively accommodated and used in the cloud. In this paper, a comprehensive survey on the state-of-art techniques in data auditing and security are discussed. Challenging problems in information repository auditing and security are presented. Finally, directions for future research in data auditing and security have been discussed

XDedup: Efficient Provably-Secure Cross-User Chunk-Level Client-Side Deduplicated Cloud Storage of Encrypted Data

Data deduplication, aiming to eliminate duplicate data, has been widely used in cloud storage to reduce the amount of storage space and save bandwidth. Unfortunately, as an increasing number of sensitive data are stored remotely, the encryption, the simplest way for data privacy, is not compatible with data deduplication. Though many research efforts have been devoted to securing deduplication, they all are subject to performance, security, and applicability limitations. Here, we propose two encrypted deduplication schemes, SDedup and XDedup, both based on Merkle puzzle. To the best of our knowledge, XDedup is the first brute-force resilient encrypted deduplication with only symmetrically cryptographic two-party interactions. The analysis and numerical simulations are conducted to demonstrate the performance and practicality of SDedup and XDedup

Data auditing and security in cloud computing: issues, challenges and future directions

Cloud computing is one of the significant development that utilizes progressive computational power and upgrades data distribution and data storing facilities. With cloud information services, it is essential for information to be saved in the cloud and also distributed across numerous customers. Cloud information repository is involved with issues of information integrity, data security and information access by unapproved users. Hence, an autonomous reviewing and auditing facility is necessary to guarantee that the information is effectively accommodated and used in the cloud. In this paper, a comprehensive survey on the state-of-art techniques in data auditing and security are discussed. Challenging problems in information repository auditing and security are presented. Finally, directions for future research in data auditing and security have been discusse

Solving the Secure Storage Dilemma: An Efficient Scheme for Secure Deduplication with Privacy-Preserving Public Auditing

Existing cloud storage systems obtain the data in its plaintext form and perform conventional (server-side) deduplication mechanisms. However, disclosing the data to the cloud can potentially threaten the security and privacy of users, which is of utmost importance for a real-world cloud storage. This can be solved by secure deduplication mechanisms which enables the user to encrypt the data on the client-side (or via an encryption-as-a-service module) before uploading it to the cloud storage. Conventional client-side encryption solutions unfortunately make the deduplication more challenging. Privacy-preserving public auditing schemes, on the other hand, is also crucial because the clients outsource their data to the cloud providers and then permanently deletes the data from their local storages. In this paper, we consider the problem of secure deduplication over encrypted data stored in the cloud while supporting a privacy-preserving public auditing mechanism.We show that existing solutions cannot support both goals simultaneously due to the conflict of their security and efficiency requirements. In this respect, we present an efficient and secure deduplication scheme that supports client-side encryption and privacy-preserving public auditing. We finally show that our scheme provides better security and efficiency with respect to the very recently proposed existing schemes