12,461 research outputs found

    Keys in the Clouds: Auditable Multi-device Access to Cryptographic Credentials

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    Personal cryptographic keys are the foundation of many secure services, but storing these keys securely is a challenge, especially if they are used from multiple devices. Storing keys in a centralized location, like an Internet-accessible server, raises serious security concerns (e.g. server compromise). Hardware-based Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are a well-known solution for protecting sensitive data in untrusted environments, and are now becoming available on commodity server platforms. Although the idea of protecting keys using a server-side TEE is straight-forward, in this paper we validate this approach and show that it enables new desirable functionality. We describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of a TEE-based Cloud Key Store (CKS), an online service for securely generating, storing, and using personal cryptographic keys. Using remote attestation, users receive strong assurance about the behaviour of the CKS, and can authenticate themselves using passwords while avoiding typical risks of password-based authentication like password theft or phishing. In addition, this design allows users to i) define policy-based access controls for keys; ii) delegate keys to other CKS users for a specified time and/or a limited number of uses; and iii) audit all key usages via a secure audit log. We have implemented a proof of concept CKS using Intel SGX and integrated this into GnuPG on Linux and OpenKeychain on Android. Our CKS implementation performs approximately 6,000 signature operations per second on a single desktop PC. The latency is in the same order of magnitude as using locally-stored keys, and 20x faster than smart cards.Comment: Extended version of a paper to appear in the 3rd Workshop on Security, Privacy, and Identity Management in the Cloud (SECPID) 201

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

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    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

    Cloud Security : A Review of Recent Threats and Solution Models

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    The most significant barrier to the wide adoption of cloud services has been attributed to perceived cloud insecurity (Smitha, Anna and Dan, 2012). In an attempt to review this subject, this paper will explore some of the major security threats to the cloud and the security models employed in tackling them. Access control violations, message integrity violations, data leakages, inability to guarantee complete data deletion, code injection, malwares and lack of expertise in cloud technology rank the major threats. The European Union invested €3m in City University London to research into the certification of Cloud security services. This and more recent developments are significant in addressing increasing public concerns regarding the confidentiality, integrity and privacy of data held in cloud environments. Some of the current cloud security models adopted in addressing cloud security threats were – Encryption of all data at storage and during transmission. The Cisco IronPort S-Series web security appliance was among security solutions to solve cloud access control issues. 2-factor Authentication with RSA SecurID and close monitoring appeared to be the most popular solutions to authentication and access control issues in the cloud. Database Active Monitoring, File Active Monitoring, URL Filters and Data Loss Prevention were solutions for detecting and preventing unauthorised data migration into and within clouds. There is yet no guarantee for a complete deletion of data by cloud providers on client requests however; FADE may be a solution (Yang et al., 2012)
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