2,466 research outputs found
Re-Encryption-Based Key Management Towards Secure and Scalable Mobile Applications in Clouds
Cloud computing confers strong economic advantages, but many clients are reluctant to implicitly trust a third-party cloud provider. To address these security concerns, data may be transmitted and stored in encrypted form. Major challenges exist concerning the aspects of the generation, distribution, and usage of encryption keys in cloud systems, such as the safe location of keys, and serving the recent trend of users that tend to connect to contemporary cloud applications using resource-constrained mobile devices in extremely large numbers simultaneously; these characteristics lead to difficulties in achieving efficient and highly scalable key management. In this work, a model for key distribution based on the principle
of dynamic data re-encryption is applied to a cloud computing system in a unique way to address the demands of a mobile device environment, including limitations on client wireless data usage, storage capacity, processing power, and battery life. The proposed cloud-based re-encryption model is secure, efficient, and highly scalable in a cloud computing context, as keys are managed by the client for trust reasons, processor-intensive data re-encryption is handled by the cloud provider, and key redistribution is minimized to conserve communication costs on mobile devices. A versioning history mechanism effectively manages keys for a continuously changing user population. Finally, an implementation on commercial mobile and cloud platforms is used to validate the performance of the model
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
Towards A Well-Secured Electronic Health Record in the Health Cloud
The major concerns for most cloud implementers particularly in the health care industry have remained data security
and privacy. A prominent and major threat that constitutes a hurdle for practitioners within the health industry from exploiting and
benefiting from the gains of cloud computing is the fear of theft of patients health data in the cloud. Investigations and surveys
have revealed that most practitioners in the health care industry are concerned about the risk of health data mix-up amongst the
various cloud providers, hacking to comprise the cloud platform and theft of vital patients’ health data.An overview of the
diverse issues relating to health data privacy and overall security in the cloud are presented in this technical report. Based on
identifed secure access requirements, an encryption-based eHR security model for securing and enforcing authorised access to
electronic health data (records), eHR is also presented. It highlights three core functionalities for managing issues relating to
health data privacy and security of eHR in health care cloud
Development in Key Share Management to Protect Data over Cloud
User data may be stored in a cloud to take advantage of its scalability, accessibility, and economics. However, data of a sensitive nature must be protected from being read in the clear by an untrusted cloud provider. This triggered a l ot of research activities, resulting in a quantity of proposals targeting the various cloud security threats. A key management scheme is proposed where encrypted key shares are stored in the cloud and automatically deleted based on passage of time or user activity. The process does not require additional coordination by the data owner, which is of advantage to a very large population of resource - constrained mobile users. The rate of expiration may be controlled through the initial allocation of shares and t he heuristics for removal. A simulation of the scheme and also its implementation on commercial mobile and cloud platforms demonstrate its practical performance
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
Trusted Computing and Secure Virtualization in Cloud Computing
Large-scale deployment and use of cloud computing in industry
is accompanied and in the same time hampered by concerns regarding protection of
data handled by cloud computing providers. One of the consequences of moving
data processing and storage off company premises is that organizations have
less control over their infrastructure. As a result, cloud service (CS) clients
must trust that the CS provider is able to protect their data and
infrastructure from both external and internal attacks. Currently however, such
trust can only rely on organizational processes declared by the CS
provider and can not be remotely verified and validated by an external party.
Enabling the CS client to verify the integrity of the host where the
virtual machine instance will run, as well as to ensure that the virtual
machine image has not been tampered with, are some steps towards building
trust in the CS provider. Having the tools to perform such
verifications prior to the launch of the VM instance allows the CS
clients to decide in runtime whether certain data should be stored- or calculations
should be made on the VM instance offered by the CS provider.
This thesis combines three components -- trusted computing, virtualization technology
and cloud computing platforms -- to address issues of trust and
security in public cloud computing environments. Of the three components,
virtualization technology has had the longest evolution and is a cornerstone
for the realization of cloud computing. Trusted computing is a recent
industry initiative that aims to implement the root of trust in a hardware
component, the trusted platform module. The initiative has been formalized
in a set of specifications and is currently at version 1.2. Cloud computing
platforms pool virtualized computing, storage and network resources in
order to serve a large number of customers customers that use a multi-tenant
multiplexing model to offer on-demand self-service over broad network.
Open source cloud computing platforms are, similar to trusted computing, a
fairly recent technology in active development.
The issue of trust in public cloud environments is addressed
by examining the state of the art within cloud computing security and
subsequently addressing the issues of establishing trust in the launch of a
generic virtual machine in a public cloud environment. As a result, the thesis
proposes a trusted launch protocol that allows CS clients
to verify and ensure the integrity of the VM instance at launch time, as
well as the integrity of the host where the VM instance is launched. The protocol
relies on the use of Trusted Platform Module (TPM) for key generation and data protection.
The TPM also plays an essential part in the integrity attestation of the
VM instance host. Along with a theoretical, platform-agnostic protocol,
the thesis also describes a detailed implementation design of the protocol
using the OpenStack cloud computing platform.
In order the verify the implementability of the proposed protocol, a prototype
implementation has built using a distributed deployment of OpenStack.
While the protocol covers only the trusted launch procedure using generic
virtual machine images, it presents a step aimed to contribute towards
the creation of a secure and trusted public cloud computing environment
Health Access Broker: Secure, Patient-Controlled Management of Personal Health Records in the Cloud
Secure and privacy-preserving management of Personal Health Records (PHRs)
has proved to be a major challenge in modern healthcare. Current solutions
generally do not offer patients a choice in where the data is actually stored
and also rely on at least one fully trusted element that patients must also
trust with their data. In this work, we present the Health Access Broker (HAB),
a patient-controlled service for secure PHR sharing that (a) does not impose a
specific storage location (uniquely for a PHR system), and (b) does not assume
any of its components to be fully secure against adversarial threats. Instead,
HAB introduces a novel auditing and intrusion-detection mechanism where its
workflow is securely logged and continuously inspected to provide auditability
of data access and quickly detect any intrusions.Comment: Copy of the paper accepted at 13th International Conference on
Computational Intelligence in Security for Information Systems (CISIS
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