Biblio

Cloud computing is one of the greatest and authoritative paradigms in computing as it provides access and use of various third-party services at a lower cost. However, there exist various security challenges facing cloud computing especially in the aspect of data privacy and this is more critical when dealing with sensitive personal or organization's data. Cloud service providers encrypt data during transfer from the local hard drive to the cloud server and at the server-side, the only problem is that the encryption key is stored by the service provider meaning they can decrypt your data. This paper discusses how cloud security can be enhanced by using client-side data encryption (pre-internet encryption), this will allow the clients to encrypt data before uploading to the cloud and store the key themselves. This means that data will be rendered to the cloud in an unreadable and secure format that cannot be accessed by unauthorized persons.

Security and confidentiality of big data stored in the cloud are important concerns for many organizations to adopt cloud services. One common approach to address the concerns is client-side encryption where data is encrypted on the client machine before being stored in the cloud. Having encrypted data in the cloud, however, limits the ability of data clustering, which is a crucial part of many data analytics applications, such as search systems. To overcome the limitation, in this paper, we present an approach named ClustCrypt for efficient topic-based clustering of encrypted unstructured big data in the cloud. ClustCrypt dynamically estimates the optimal number of clusters based on the statistical characteristics of encrypted data. It also provides clustering approach for encrypted data. We deploy ClustCrypt within the context of a secure cloud-based semantic search system (S3BD). Experimental results obtained from evaluating ClustCrypt on three datasets demonstrate on average 60% improvement on clusters' coherency. ClustCrypt also decreases the search-time overhead by up to 78% and increases the accuracy of search results by up to 35%.