Securing the Clouds

Abstract

Cloud computing is all the rage. “It’s become the phrase du jour,” says Gartner senior analyst Ben Pring [16]. While some consider it as a future derived technology that will not only help organisations to gain more profit but will also have a positive impact on the environment, others consider it as a past derived technology which is a refined version of Timesharing model from late 1960’s and nothing new. Whatever the words be, Cloud computing has gained a lot of attention in the recent years and has a wide scope in the IT industry and the big IT giants are all set to provide cloud services to the clients, as they require. Beside its wide possibilities, one threat that cloud faces is of its security issues. As in cloud computing, the data resides in the third party data centers, and the data is always vulnerable to attacks and changes. The changes or modification of data can be in from of a third party attack where a unauthorised person makes unwanted modification in the data or it can be a insider attack where an authorised person makes unauthorised changes in data. In this paper we identify some areas where cryptography can help a rapid adoption of cloud computing. Although secure storage has already captured the attention of many cloud providers, offering a higher level of protection for their customer’s data, we think that more advanced techniques such as searchable encryption will become popular in the near future, opening the doors of the Cloud to customers with higher security requirements.