Biblio
Cloud service providers offer a low-cost and convenient solution to host unstructured data. However, cloud services act as third-party solutions and do not provide control of the data to users. This has raised security and privacy concerns for many organizations (users) with sensitive data to utilize cloud-based solutions. User-side encryption can potentially address these concerns by establishing user-centric cloud services and granting data control to the user. Nonetheless, user-side encryption limits the ability to process (e.g., search) encrypted data on the cloud. Accordingly, in this research, we provide a framework that enables processing (in particular, searching) of encrypted multiorganizational (i.e., multi-source) big data without revealing the data to cloud provider. Our framework leverages locality feature of edge computing to offer a user-centric search ability in a realtime manner. In particular, the edge system intelligently predicts the user's search pattern and prunes the multi-source big data search space to reduce the search time. The pruning system is based on efficient sampling from the clustered big dataset on the cloud. For each cluster, the pruning system dynamically samples appropriate number of terms based on the user's search tendency, so that the cluster is optimally represented. We developed a prototype of a user-centric search system and evaluated it against multiple datasets. Experimental results demonstrate 27% improvement in the pruning quality and search accuracy.
LBSs are Location-Based Services that provide certain service based on the current or past user's location. During the past decade, LBSs have become more popular as a result of the widespread use of mobile devices with position functions. Location information is a secondary information that can provide personal insight about one's life. This issue associated with sharing of data in cloud-based locations. For example, a hospital is a public space and the actual location of the hospital does not carry any sensitive information. However, it may become sensitive if the specialty of the hospital is analyzed. In this paper we proposed design presents a combination of methods for providing data privacy protection for location-based services (LBSs) with the use of cloud service. The work built in zero trust and we start to manage the access to the system through different levels. The proposal is based on a model that stores user location data in supplementary servers and not in non-trustable third-party applications. The approach of the present research is to analyze the privacy protection possibilities through data partitioning. The data collected from the different recourses are distributed into different servers according to the partitioning model based on multi-level policy. Access is granted to third party applications only to designated servers and the privacy of the user profile is also ensured in each server, as they are not trustable.
The Principle of Least Privilege is a security objective of granting users only those accesses they need to perform their duties. Creating least privilege policies in the cloud environment with many diverse services, each with unique privilege sets, is significantly more challenging than policy creation previously studied in other environments. Such security policies are always imperfect and must balance between the security risk of granting over-privilege and the effort to correct for under-privilege. In this paper, we formally define the problem of balancing between over-privilege and under-privilege as the Privilege Error Minimization Problem (PEMP) and present a method for quantitatively scoring security policies. We design and compare three algorithms for automatically generating policies: a naive algorithm, an unsupervised learning algorithm, and a supervised learning algorithm. We present the results of evaluating these three policy generation algorithms on a real-world dataset consisting of 5.2 million Amazon Web Service (AWS) audit log entries. The application of these methods can help create policies that balance between an organization's acceptable level of risk and effort to correct under-privilege.
This paper proposes an efficient auditing scheme for checking the integrity of dynamic data shared among a static group of users outsourced at untrusted cloud storage. The scheme is designed based on CDH-based ring signature scheme. The scheme enables a third party auditor to audit the client's data without knowing the content while also preserving the identity privacy of the group member who is signing the data from the auditor as well as from the cloud server. The identity of the group member who is signing the data block can be revealed only by the authorized opener, if needed. The paper presents a comparative performance study and security analysis of the proposed scheme.
Emerging Machine Learning (ML) techniques, such as Deep Neural Network, are widely used in today's applications and services. However, with social awareness of privacy and personal data rapidly rising, it becomes a pressing and challenging societal issue to both keep personal data private and benefit from the data analytics power of ML techniques at the same time. In this paper, we argue that to avoid those costs, reduce latency in data processing, and minimise the raw data revealed to service providers, many future AI and ML services could be deployed on users' devices at the Internet edge rather than putting everything on the cloud. Moving ML-based data analytics from cloud to edge devices brings a series of challenges. We make three contributions in this paper. First, besides the widely discussed resource limitation on edge devices, we further identify two other challenges that are not yet recognised in existing literature: lack of suitable models for users, and difficulties in deploying services for users. Second, we present preliminary work of the first systematic solution, i.e. Zoo, to fully support the construction, composing, and deployment of ML models on edge and local devices. Third, in the deployment example, ML service are proved to be easy to compose and deploy with Zoo. Evaluation shows its superior performance compared with state-of-art deep learning platforms and Google ML services.
Reuse of pre-existing industry datasets for research purposes requires a multi-stakeholder solution that balances the researcher's analysis objectives with the need to engage the industry data custodian, whilst respecting the privacy rights of human data subjects. Current methods place the burden on the data custodian, whom may not be sufficiently trained to fully appreciate the nuances of data de-identification. Through modelling of functional, quality, and emotional goals, we propose a de-identification in the cloud approach whereby the researcher proposes analyses along with the extraction and de-identification operations, while engaging the industry data custodian with secure control over authorising the proposed analyses. We demonstrate our approach through implementation of a de-identification portal for sports club data.
We address the problem of substring searchable encryption. A single user produces a big stream of data and later on wants to learn the positions in the string that some patterns occur. Although current techniques exploit auxiliary data structures to achieve efficient substring search on the server side, the cost at the user side may be prohibitive. We revisit the work of substring searchable encryption in order to reduce the storage cost of auxiliary data structures. Our solution entails a suffix array based index design, which allows optimal storage cost \$O(n)\$ with small hidden factor at the size of the string n. Moreover, we implemented our scheme and the state of the art protocol $\backslash$textbackslashciteChase to demonstrate the performance advantage of our solution with precise benchmark results.
The use of typing biometrics—the characteristic typing patterns of individual keyboard users—has been studied extensively in the context of enhancing multi-factor authentication services. The key starting point for such work has been the collection of high-fidelity local timing data, and the key (implicit) security assumption has been that such biometrics could not be obtained by other means. We show that the latter assumption to be false, and that it is entirely feasible to obtain useful typing biometric signatures from third-party timing logs. Specifically, we show that the logs produced by realtime collaboration services during their normal operation are of sufficient fidelity to successfully impersonate a user using remote data only. Since the logs are routinely shared as a byproduct of the services' operation, this creates an entirely new avenue of attack that few users would be aware of. As a proof of concept, we construct successful biometric attacks using only the log-based structure (complete editing history) of a shared Google Docs, or Zoho Writer, document which is readily available to all contributing parties. Using the largest available public data set of typing biometrics, we are able to create successful forgeries 100% of the time against a commercial biometric service. Our results suggest that typing biometrics are not robust against practical forgeries, and should not be given the same weight as other authentication factors. Another important implication is that the routine collection of detailed timing logs by various online services also inherently (and implicitly) contains biometrics. This not only raises obvious privacy concerns, but may also undermine the effectiveness of network anonymization solutions, such as ToR, when used with existing services.
Cloud computing belongs to distributed network technology for computing and storage capabilities purpose. It is a kind of cost-effective technology dedicated to information technology. Using the Internet, the accessibility and retrieving of cloud data have become much more accessible. The service providers can expand the storage space in a cloud environment. Security is well-thought-out to be the essential attribute in a distributed system. Cryptography can be described as a method of securing the data from attackers and eavesdroppers. Third Party Auditor is responsible for the authentication of secret files in cloud system on behalf of the data owner. The data auditability technique allows the user to make the data integrity check using a third party. Cloud computing offers unlimited data space for storage to its users and also serves sharing of data and planned use of heterogeneous resources in distributed systems. This paper describes privacy-preserving enabled public auditing method using cryptographic techniques for low-performance based end devices.
With the extensive application of cloud computing technology, the government, enterprises and individuals have migrated their IT applications and sensitive data to the cloud. The cloud security issues have been paid more and more attention by academics and industry. At present, the cloud security solutions are mainly implemented in the user cloud platform, such as the internal part of guest virtual machine, high privileged domain, and virtual machine monitor (VMM) or hardware layer. Through the monitoring of the tenant virtual machine to find out malicious attacks and abnormal state, which ensures the security of user cloud to a certain extent. However, this kind of method has the following shortcomings: firstly, it will increase the cloud platform overhead and interfere with the normal cloud services. Secondly, it could only obtain a limited type of security state information, so the function is single and difficult to expand. Thirdly, there will cause false information if the user cloud platform has been compromised, which will affect the effectiveness of cloud security monitoring. This paper proposes a cloud security model based on cloud introspection technology. In the user cloud platform, we deploy cloud probes to obtain the user cloud state information, such as system memory, network communication and disk storage, etc. Then we synchronize the cloud state information to the introspection cloud, which is deployed independent. Finally, through bridging the semantic gap and data analysis in the introspection cloud, we can master the security state of user cloud. At the same time, we design and implement the prototype system of CloudI (Cloud Introspection). Through the comparison with the original cloud security technology by a series of experiments, CloudI has characteristics of high security, high performance, high expandability and multiple functions.
Cloud-backed file systems provide on-demand, high-availability, scalable storage. Their security may be improved with techniques such as erasure codes and secret sharing to fragment files and encryption keys in several clouds. Attacking the server-side of such systems involves penetrating one or more clouds, which can be extremely difficult. Despite all these benefits, a weak side remains: the client-side. The client devices store user credentials that, if stolen or compromised, may lead to confidentiality, integrity, and availability violations. In this paper we propose RockFS, a cloud-backed file system framework that aims to make the client-side of such systems resilient to attacks. RockFS protects data in the client device and allows undoing unintended file modifications.
We design a Practical and Privacy-Aware Truth Discovery (PPATD) approach in mobile crowd sensing systems, which supports users to go offline at any time while still achieving practical efficiency under working process. More notably, our PPATD is the first solution under single server setting to resolve the problem that users must be online at all times during the truth discovery. Moreover, we design a double-masking with one-time pads protocol to further ensure the strong security of users' privacy even if there is a collusion between the cloud server and multiple users.
The development of cloud computing technology and the popularization of cloud services have a great impact on the industry. On the one hand, cloud technology enhances network's operation efficiency and reduces the cost. On the other hand, the cloud resource can be accessed by any network equipment. It increases the chances that the identity of user is misrepresented and then led to many security problems. Therefore, the actual needs of security can't be fully satisfied with controlling the malicious user access to the cloud resource by login authentication that relies solely on current user identity. User is the requester and provider of cloud resources. User behavior's credibility relates to the safety of cloud directly. So it's very important to evaluate whether user behaviors can be trusted or not on cloud. In this paper, the method is studied based on the multilevel fuzzy comprehensive evaluation. And in this evaluation study, indicators of user behavior credibility are carried on a thorough discussion.
Data loss is perceived as one of the major threats for cloud storage. Consequently, the security community developed several challenge-response protocols that allow a user to remotely verify whether an outsourced file is still intact. However, two important practical problems have not yet been considered. First, clients commonly outsource multiple files of different sizes, raising the question how to formalize such a scheme and in particular ensuring that all files can be simultaneously audited. Second, in case auditing of the files fails, existing schemes do not provide a client with any method to prove if the original files are still recoverable. We address both problems and describe appropriate solutions. The first problem is tackled by providing a new type of "Proofs of Retrievability" scheme, enabling a client to check all files simultaneously in a compact way. The second problem is solved by defining a novel procedure called "Proofs of Recoverability", enabling a client to obtain an assurance whether a file is recoverable or irreparably damaged. Finally, we present a combination of both schemes allowing the client to check the recoverability of all her original files, thus ensuring cloud storage file recoverability.
Enhancing trust among service providers and end-users with respect to data protection is an urgent matter in the growing information society. In response, CREDENTIAL proposes an innovative cloud-based service for storing, managing, and sharing of digital identity information and other highly critical personal data with a demonstrably higher level of security than other current solutions. CREDENTIAL enables end-to-end confidentiality and authenticity as well as improved privacy in cloud-based identity management and data sharing scenarios. In this paper, besides clarifying the vision and use cases, we focus on the adoption of CREDENTIAL. Firstly, for adoption by providers, we elaborate on the functionality of CREDENTIAL, the services implementing these functions, and the physical architecture needed to deploy such services. Secondly, we investigate factors from related research that could be used to facilitate CREDENTIAL's adoption and list key benefits as convincing arguments.
Cloud computing is a wide architecture based on diverse models for providing different services of software and hardware. Cloud computing paradigm attracts different users because of its several benefits such as high resource elasticity, expense reduction, scalability and simplicity which provide significant preserving in terms of investment and work force. However, the new approaches introduced by the cloud, related to computation outsourcing, distributed resources, multi-tenancy concept, high dynamism of the model, data warehousing and the nontransparent style of cloud increase the security and privacy concerns and makes building and handling trust among cloud service providers and consumers a critical security challenge. This paper proposes a new approach to improve security of data in cloud computing. It suggests a classification model to categorize data before being introduced into a suitable encryption system according to the category. Since data in cloud has not the same sensitivity level, encrypting it with the same algorithms can lead to a lack of security or of resources. By this method we try to optimize the resources consumption and the computation cost while ensuring data confidentiality.
Users today enjoy access to a wealth of services that rely on user-contributed data, such as recommendation services, prediction services, and services that help classify and interpret data. The quality of such services inescapably relies on trustworthy contributions from users. However, validating the trustworthiness of contributions may rely on privacy-sensitive contextual data about the user, such as a user's location or usage habits, creating a conflict between privacy and trust: users benefit from a higher-quality service that identifies and removes illegitimate user contributions, but, at the same time, they may be reluctant to let the service access their private information to achieve this high quality. We argue that this conflict can be resolved with a pragmatic Glimmer of Trust, which allows services to validate user contributions in a trustworthy way without forfeiting user privacy. We describe how trustworthy hardware such as Intel's SGX can be used on the client-side–-in contrast to much recent work exploring SGX in cloud services–-to realize the Glimmer architecture, and demonstrate how this realization is able to resolve the tension between privacy and trust in a variety of cases.
The Internet of Things (IoT) comes together with the connection between sensors and devices. These smart devices have been upgraded from a standalone device which can only handle a specific task at one time to an interactive device that can handle multiple tasks in time. However, this technology has been exposed to many vulnerabilities especially on the malicious attacks of the devices. With the IoT constraints and low-security mechanisms applied, the malicious attacks could exploit the sensor vulnerability to provide wrong data where it can lead to wrong interpretation and actuation to the users. Due to this problems, this short paper presents an event-based access control framework that considers integrity, privacy and the authenticity in the IoT devices.
In this paper, we provide a secure and efficient outsourcing scheme for multi-owner data sharing on the cloud. More in detail we consider the scenario where multiple data owners outsource their data to an untrusted cloud provider, and allow authorized users to query the resulting database, composed of the encrypted data contributed by the different owners. The scheme relies on a proxy re-encryption technique that is implemented using an El-Gamal Elliptic Curve(ECC) crypto-system. We experimentally assess the efficiency of the implementation in terms of computation time, including the key translation process, data encryption and re-encryption modules, and show that it improves over previous proposals.
The present study's primary objective is to try to determine whether gender, combined with the educational background of the Internet users, have an effect on the way online privacy is perceived and practiced within the cloud services and specifically in social networking, e-commerce, and online banking. An online questionnaire was distributed through e-mail and the social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+). Our primary hypothesis is that an interrelationship may exist among a user's gender, educational background, and the way an online user perceives and acts regarding online privacy. An analysis of a representative sample of Greek Internet users revealed that there is an effect by gender on the online users' awareness regarding online privacy, as well as on the way they act upon it. Furthermore, we found that a correlation exists, as well regarding the Educational Background of the users and the issue of online privacy.