Cloud Data Security and Secure Data Sharing Methods

1
CLOUD DATA SECURITY AND SECURE DATA SHARING METHODS
MUSTAFA SADEQ JAAFAR *
Department of Information Technology, Bharati Vidyapeeth Deemed University, Pune, India.
This is a common fact nowadays to use the external third party resources for data storage and
sharing among multiple personnel of the same organization or different organizations. Such external
resources are collectively known as Cloud Computing resources. Cloud Computing resources save
time, cost and efforts required to manage the huge data of organizations. Due to the rapid growth of
using cloud services in many organizations or individuals, there are many concerns resulted. The
major concerns are data sharing, security and efficiency. Since from last 15 years, there are number
of solutions and researches were conducted and applied. Data sharing both single user and multi-user
in Cloud Computing, and hence it is required that data sharing is strongly secured, number of recent
cryptography base methods such as Identity Based Encryption or Attributed Based Encryption are
designed for secure data sharing among multiple users. All the recent methods have some limitations
and advantages. This paper addresses the current research problems of data security and privacy
preserving in cloud servers. The study was presented over different methods of cloud data security
and their comparative analysis first. At we discussed the research limitations of those methods.
Keywords: Cloud Computing, Data Security, Data Sharing, Cryptography, Multi-User Sharing,
Servers, Storage.
1. Introduction
Nowadays, Cloud Computing systems are widely available to use for different
purpose of data storage and sharing in order to save the costs and time. The stored data is
shared among the multiple users in Cloud Computing and this is a very frequent task.
Hence Cloud Computing is a rapidly growing resource service providing framework with
less time and less cost requirements from the last 10-15 years. The services of Cloud
Computing are offering number of benefits to the small and large organizations for their
important data management. Cloud Computing is one of the matchless and having the
new label of the traditional idea. The collections of resources in Cloud Computing
framework are provided by a service provider of the cloud to the end users based on their
demands through the internet. The services of cloud are distributed all over the world.
Cloud Computing creates the virtual environment for its users in which it allows the end
users to use services or resources of the cloud virtually. Due to the number of advantages
from using Cloud Computing framework, it becomes under spotlights in just few years of
span. The common example of cloud services is Amazon AWS cloud services, IBM,
Google etc. Along with the number of benefits from using Cloud Computing services,
there are a number of challenges also such as availability, reliability, and most important
and widely studied research problem is the security. The growing use of cloud services
*
Typeset names in 8 pt Times Roman, uppercase. Use the footnote to indicate the present or permanent address
of the author.
International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security (IJCSIS),
Vol. 15, No. 9, September 2017
263 https://sites.google.com/site/ijcsis/
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resulted into a number of security challenges. The absence of effective data security
methods is the main concern in traditional Cloud Computing services and platforms.
In order to provide the data security, a number of techniques introduced since the last
15 years or more. Data security and confidentiality are the main requirements in such
Cloud Computing systems with big data frameworks. Some of these methods are based
on the cryptography approach with the goal of achieving the data security under Cloud
Computing systems. The method of Public Key Encryption (PKE) for example allows
data encryption at the sender’s side by using the public key of the intended receiver of
data with the goal of providing the data security and it should be accessed by legitimate
users only. But the limitation of this approach is that, it failed to address all the
requirements of end users for cloud data security. In a hospital day to day operation in
which the medical information of individual patients is stored into cloud storage systems,
the data stored over the cloud system is in an encrypted form using the PKE approach
with the goal of preventing the invalid access to the patient’s sensitive data by any invalid
user. Therefore, after storing the patient’s data in an encrypted format over the cloud
server, only legitimate users are able to access or having privileges for accessing such
data stored on the cloud server. The recently introduced methods along with the PKE
such as Identity Based Encryption (IBE) as well as the Attribute Based Encryption (ABE)
are all achieving the confidentiality of such medical data efficiently [4] [5]. The IBE
(Identity Based Encryption) is one of the best approaches for Public Key Encryption
which is presented basically for the sake of simplifying the process of key management in
certificate based PKI (Public Key Infrastructure). This can be done by using the human
intelligible parameters such as email address, IP address and unique name etc. as public
keys. After that, the sender who’s using the IBE doesn’t need to look into the public key
& the certificate, just directly encrypting a message with the receiver’s identity. As like
as, the receiver achieves the private key which is allocated with the corresponding
identity from the Private Key Generator (PKG) and it is available for the decryption of
such types of cipher text. Though IBE allows an arbitrary string as the public key which
is considered as an appealing advantage over the PKI, it demands an efficient revocation
mechanism, specifically if there are private keys of many users that got compromised, we
must provide a mean to revoke such users from system. In the PKI setting, revocation
mechanism is to be corrected by the appending validity periods of certificates or by using
some involved combinations of techniques [2] [3] [4]. Nevertheless, the given
cumbersome management of certificates is precisely the burden that the IBE strives to
alleviate. Additionally, the previous techniques based on cryptography which was
proposed for guaranteed personal information confidentiality and multi-user data sharing
are vulnerable to the security threats like data loss and leakage. This is because of the
existing cryptography techniques are not considering the anonymity of the sender or the
receiver cipher texts. Hence it is possible that the novice or invalid user is able to obtain
the information of cipher text. For example, the cloud server which may know the
information of the public key used in the encryption, and hence it might be possible for
the cloud server to obtain the cipher text information with the name of patient related to
that cipher text. Similarly, the recipient of the cipher text may be identified from the
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available cipher text without any trouble so this is one more serious reason behind the
achieving of patient’s data privacy [6].
In this paper, the motivation is to analyse all the recent cloud data security methods
presented for achieving privacy preservation, secure multi-user data sharing and etc.
Their frameworks and methodology were discussed. In section II, the different challenges
and concerns of the cloud data security are presented. In section III, studies on all the
existing techniques for achieving the cloud data security were also discussed. In section
IV, the comparative analyses of the discussed methods are presented along with the
research problems. Finally the conclusion and future work of this paper is presented.
2. Cloud security concerns
There are a number of security issues related to Cloud Computing frameworks for
data storage. During this section, various security challenges are discussed.
Fig.1. Different Security Issues in the Cloud Data Storage
Below listed are the main cloud security issues which are addressed by the cloud
service providers while applying and delivering the cloud services to end users.
1. Privacy Preserving: Store the individual private/personal infrmation this only access
the authorized person that person only rights.The privacy in Cloud Computing
framework this is based on the cloud deployment model.To the reduction of cost the
advantages of public cloud is one of the promising architectures. However this public
cloud is relying over the cloud service provider in order to manage as well as to keep end
users information safe and secured which leads to a number of privacy related issues such
as:
• Unauthorized Secondary Usage: The placing the data to legitimate and
authorized secondary uses the data will be secure and profit.For the scondary
uses no any technical barriers at the present.
• Trans border Dataflow and Data Proliferation: Data proliferation is an
attribute of Cloud Computing systems which is composed of a number of
companies and hence not managed as well as not controlled by individual
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data owners.Easy to use the copying the data over many data centers
gurantees. The main challenging point is backup of data or its duplicate copy
is not saved or processed with a specific authority.
• Lack of User Control: Whenever in cloud comuting frameworks,
processing and sharing of user’s important infromation is not having more
control which leadsto face some threats like theft, missuse or illegal access.
• Dynamic Provision: The nature of the cloud is vibrant therefore it is not so
clear that who is responsible legally in order to ensure the sensitive data
privacy which is stored by end users on a cloud server.
2. Security of the Cloud Data: In the cloud computing public clouds are not only
increasing the security concerns but also increasing the issues of privacy. Below listed are
some of the common security concerns for public clouds:
• Access: In the cloud securiy is one of the threats of accessing the personal
and private information.It might be possible that any attacker can try to
access others’ personal information.
• Availability and Backup: In this environment no guaranty for the
existenece & back up of the data. The Business backup is one of the
important considerations.
• Multi-Tenancy: In this one program can be run onto many machines using
the feature of SAAS (Software as a Service). CSP (Cloud Service Provider)
wheneve we use the multi-tenant application of the cloud that time decease
the cost of use the virtual machines but in this time increase the risk of
vulnerability.
• Data Lifecycle Control: On the data customer which havaing control, if he
or she was removed or deleted then the data vendor cannot regain control
over the data.
• Auditing: Implemeting the internal monitoringcontrol CSP (Cloud Service
Provider) is requiring the external auditing mechanism. But still the cloud
fails to give an auditing for transactions without affecting the data integrity.
3. Trust: Trust is most important or required to every organization to the incresing the
profits by using the clooud services. However, the cloud has failed to achieve the trust
between the end user and the cloud service provider, hence a vendor uses this marvelous
application that should make trust available but in reality there is a weak relationship
from the customer side towards the service provider & the customer trust issues that
appears because of many problems during the deployment of the cloud services.
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3. Related work
In this section, recent methods for achieving the cloud security are discussed those
which were presented from 2013 onwards.
Xuefeng Liu et.al (2013)
In [1], The MONA method is designed for the clod data sharing. MONA was
designed for dynamic groups in an un-trusted cloud. Using this approach the user able to
share the data with others in the group without revaling identity privacy to the cloud.This
method supported the efficient user revocation as well as the new user joining
methodology. The efficient user revocation was achieved via a public revocation list
without updating the private keys of the remaining users and the new users were directly
decrypting their files stored on the cloud before their participation. The experimental
results of MONA have shown that the storage overhead and the encryption computation
cost were constants. The system model designed by the authors is shown below in figure
2.
Fig.3. MONA System Model
Zhifeng Xiao et.al (2013)
In [2], using the attribute-driven mehodologythe authors presented the
systematic study of security and privacy issues in cloud computing. They identified the
most representative security/privacy attributes (e.g., confidentiality, integrity, availability,
accountability, and privacy-preservability), as well as discussed the vulnerabilities, which
may be exploited by adversaries in order to perform various attacks. Defence strategies
and suggestions were discussed as well.
Huang Lin et.al (2013)
In [3] additionally, the outsourcing decryption technique and a newly proposed
key for private proxy re-encryption were used to shift the computational complexity of
the involved parties to the cloud without compromising the clients’ privacy and the
service providers’ intellectual property. They solved the security problems by designing
the cloud-assisted privacy preserving mobile health monitoring method in order to protect
the privacy of the involved parties and their data.
Cheng-Kang Chu et.al (2013)
In [4], author used the novel-key cryptosystems for secure data sharing. This
approach produced constant-size cipher texts so that the efficient delegation of the
decryption rights for any set of cipher texts would be possible. Using thid approach
anyone can aggregate any set of secret keys and make them as compact as a single
key,but encompassing the power of all the keys being aggregated.The aggregated
compact key easily transmitted from one place to other or save in smart cards with
minimum storage requirements.
Kaitai Liang et.al (2014)
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In this [5], the author defined the notation of DFA (Deterministic Finite Automata)-based
functional proxy re-encryption, and introduced a concrete approach for satisfying this
notion. The author assigned that the scheme, which was the first of its kind, to be
adaptively CCA (chosen-cipher text attacks) secure in the standard model by employing
Lewko et al.’s dual encryption technology [5].
Seung-Hyun Seo et.al (2014)
In [6],this using the (MC-LPKE) method provides the formal security.Usin this
method solved the key escrow problem and the revocation problem.In this using the key
building block,hey proposed an improved share sensitive data in public clouds
securely.Their method supported immediate revocation and assured the confidentiality of
the data stored on an untrusted public cloud while enforcing the access control policies of
the data owner.
JunJie Qiu et.al (2015)
In [7], this Cloud Computing based applications the several of Identity-Based
Proxy Re-Encryption (IBPRE) this is based on security method. This method was based
on CT07 framework introduced earlier. The main purposed to devloped this method is
prevent the collusion of delegation and proxy. This method extends the approach
previously proposed by overcoming its problems related to non-interactivity and uni-
directionality. In this approach the security was achieved by addition of secrete parameter
as well as changing the re-encryption key and the secrete key. The theoretical analysis of
this method was showing the security against the CCA (chosen-cipher text attacks) and
the collusion attack for standard model. The open research problem with this method is
the CS (Cloud Server) and the anonymity.
Baojiang Cui et.al (2015)
In [8], in this author devloped the KASE (key-Aggregate Searchable
Encryption) approach this mehod specially devloped to cloud data security.Whenever use
this approach the owner only needs to distribute a single key to a user when sharing lots
of documents with that user and the user only needs to submit a single trapdoor when he
or she queries over all the documents shared by the same owner. The limitaion of this
apporach is whenever user wants to query over the documents shared by multiple
owners,they must generate multiple trapdoors to the cloud.
Xinyi Huang et.al (2015)
In [9], in this author devloped the new idea known as FSID-BRS (Forward
Secure ID-Based Ring Signature). This approach mainly focus on ID-based ring
signature mehod in order to have forword security.The first literature is ID-based setting.
Their method delivered the unconditional anonymity and can prove the forward-secure
unforgivable in the random oracle model, by considering the fact that RSA (Rivest,
Shamir, Adleman) problem is hard to solve already. Experimentally they had shown that
their approach is very usefull and does not require any pairing operations.
Ximeng Liu et.al (2015)
In [10], this author devloped the efficient privacy preserving outsourced
cmputaion method of usefull to the public data, called EPOC. EPOC enabled the user to
outsource the computation of a function over multi-dimensional public data to the cloud
while protecting the privacy of the function and its output.The author devloped the three
types of EPOC in order to trade-off among various levels of privacy protection and
performance. They presented a novel cryptosystem called Switchable Homomorphism
Encryption with Partial Decryption (SHED) as the core cryptographic primitive for
EPOC.The another thing is the author additionally devloped the tw coding techniqes,
called Message Pre-coding and Message Extending and Coding, for the messages
encrypted under a Composite order group. Also they proposed a Secure Exponent
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Calculation Protocol with Public Base (SEPB), which serves as the core sub-protocol in
EPOC. The complete system model designed by the author is showing below in figure 3.
Fig.3. System Model Designed in [10]
Mi Wen et.al (2015)
In [11], this introduced the key management approach based on a session key
convergent called SKC in order to secure the dynamic update during the process of data
deduplication. Using this approach,, every data owner verified the session key correctness
as well as changes it dynamically with the data update. They conducted the security
analysis in order to demonstrate both SKC and CKS (convergent key sharing) methods in
terms of their protection for the confidentiality of the data and the convergent key in the
case of the dynamic updates.
Shungan Zhou et.al (2016)
In [12], this author introduced the cloud data security with the goal of security,
scalability and efficient multi-user data sharing. The name of approach is SSEM given by
the author.Using this approach the diffrent data owners are capable of sharing the data in
a pattern of many-to-many.This leads to a conclusion which states that SSEM approach
was suitable for the applications of a group based sharing of data with asymmetric group
key agreement.
4. Analysis and research gap
Based on the study that was conducted on the above mentioned different methods in
this paper, an analysis of all these methods was presented below to point out the current
research gaps. Table 1 is showing the comparative study of several recent methods with
respect to the different security requirements.
Table 1: Comparative Analysis of Some Recent Cloud Security Methods
Ref. No. PA PP SDS SE TP TPS
[1] x x x
[3] x x x x x
[4] x x x x
[5] x x x x x
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[6] x x x x
[8] x x x x
[9] x x x
[12] x x
Research Limitations and Gaps:
Based on the above study and its observations, the current research challenges are:
- Most of the methods failed to cover public auditing except for the MONA [1].
- Scalability is not evaluated with respect to public auditing.
- Third party scalability is not addressed in all the mentioned methods.
- MONA [1] worked on public auditing, privacy preserving and secure multi-user
data sharing, but scalability is not addressed.
- The other methods designed with limited scopes.
5. Conclusion and future work
In this paper, the introduction of Cloud Computing framework and the necessity of cloud
security methods were presented. Further the different security concerns of Cloud
Computing frameworks were discussed as well. The secondary objective of this paper
was to present a study over most of the recent cloud security methods with different
purposes. The methods from 2013 up to 2016 were all introduced to handle the issues of
privacy preserving, public auditing, secure data sharing, proxy re-encryption, scalability
evaluation and etc. Based on this study the current research problems were marked and
discussed. Finally, the future work of this paper would be working on the current
limitations and gaps of the previously mentioned researches and their methods to address
the proper solutions and to cover the missing points that were mentioned in this paper to
optimize and enhance the efficiency of Cloud Computing frameworks.
References
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Evaluation, TP: Third Party, TPS: Third Party Scalability
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Kaitai Liang, Man Ho Au, Member, IEEE, Joseph K. Liu, Willy Susilo,"A DFA-Based Functional
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