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

Vulnerability Assessment and Privacy-preserving Computations in Smart Grid

Modern advances in sensor, computing, and communication technologies enable various smart grid applications which highlight the vulnerability that requires novel approaches to the field of cybersecurity. While substantial numbers of technologies have been adopted to protect cyber attacks in smart grid, there lacks a comprehensive review of the implementations, impacts, and solutions of cyber attacks specific to the smart grid.In this dissertation, we are motivated to evaluate the security requirements for the smart grid which include three main properties: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. First, we review the cyber-physical security of the synchrophasor network, which highlights all three aspects of security issues. Taking the synchrophasor network as an example, we give an overview of how to attack a smart grid network. We test three types of attacks and show the impact of each attack consisting of denial-of-service attack, sniffing attack, and false data injection attack.Next, we discuss how to protect against each attack. For protecting availability, we examine possible defense strategies for the associated vulnerabilities.For protecting data integrity, a small-scale prototype of secure synchrophasor network is presented with different cryptosystems. Besides, a deep learning based time-series anomaly detector is proposed to detect injected measurement. Our approach observes both data measurements and network traffic features to jointly learn system states and can detect attacks when state vector estimator fails.For protecting data confidentiality, we propose privacy-preserving algorithms for two important smart grid applications. 1) A distributed privacy-preserving quadratic optimization algorithm to solve Security Constrained Optimal Power Flow (SCOPF) problem. The SCOPF problem is decomposed into small subproblems using the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) and gradient projection algorithms. 2) We use Paillier cryptosystem to secure the computation of the power system dynamic simulation. The IEEE 3-Machine 9-Bus System is used to implement and demonstrate the proposed scheme. The security and performance analysis of our implementations demonstrate that our algorithms can prevent chosen-ciphertext attacks at a reasonable cost

A Privacy-Preserving Outsourced Data Model in Cloud Environment

Nowadays, more and more machine learning applications, such as medical diagnosis, online fraud detection, email spam filtering, etc., services are provided by cloud computing. The cloud service provider collects the data from the various owners to train or classify the machine learning system in the cloud environment. However, multiple data owners may not entirely rely on the cloud platform that a third party engages. Therefore, data security and privacy problems are among the critical hindrances to using machine learning tools, particularly with multiple data owners. In addition, unauthorized entities can detect the statistical input data and infer the machine learning model parameters. Therefore, a privacy-preserving model is proposed, which protects the privacy of the data without compromising machine learning efficiency. In order to protect the data of data owners, the epsilon-differential privacy is used, and fog nodes are used to address the problem of the lower bandwidth and latency in this proposed scheme. The noise is produced by the epsilon-differential mechanism, which is then added to the data. Moreover, the noise is injected at the data owner site to protect the owners data. Fog nodes collect the noise-added data from the data owners, then shift it to the cloud platform for storage, computation, and performing the classification tasks purposes

The Potential for Machine Learning Analysis over Encrypted Data in Cloud-based Clinical Decision Support - Background and Review

This paper appeared at the 8th Australasian Workshop on Health Informatics and Knowledge Management (HIKM 2015), Sydney, Australia, January 2015. Conferences in Research and Practice in Information Technology (CRPIT), Vol. 164, Anthony Maeder and Jim Warren, Ed. Reproduction for academic, not-for profit purposes permitted provided this text is includedIn an effort to reduce the risk of sensitive data exposure in untrusted networks such as the public cloud, increasing attention has recently been given to encryption schemes that allow specific computations to occur on encrypted data, without the need for decryption. This relies on the fact that some encryption algorithms display the property of homomorphism, which allows them to manipulate data in a meaningful way while still in encrypted form. Such a framework would find particular relevance in Clinical Decision Support (CDS) applications deployed in the public cloud. CDS applications have an important computational and analytical role over confidential healthcare information with the aim of supporting decision-making in clinical practice. This review paper examines the history and current status of homomoprhic encryption and its potential for preserving the privacy of patient data underpinning cloud-based CDS applications