Cloud Cryptography- I

A brief intro and its need!

“If someone asks me what cloud computing is, I try not to get bogged down with definitions. I tell them that, simply put, cloud computing is a better way to run your business”

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com

Agreeing with what CEO of Saleforce.com (One of the largest cloud provider!) says, I won’t be stating any formal articulate definition rather we’d critically analyze the pros and cons of Cloud Computing. Though cloud has helped us overcome various shortcomings yet it comes with some strings attached emanating some serious security threats.

Let’s find out……!

Cloud Computing, is an efficient way of storing and accessing services, resources and applications over a virtual network. But like I said no formal definitions here!(You can refer to my previous article “Introduction to Cloud Computing” for more details.)

Some of the greatest advantages of Cloud include :

• On-Demand Self-Service
• Pay-as-you-Go business model
• Scalability

These advantages have lead to increased popularity of Cloud in recent times.

Although Cloud Computing have a number of benefits, yet it poses serious privacy and security threats to its users.

Exploitation of Cloud services like multi-tenancy, resource pooling, shareability features by cyber criminals or anyone with a malicious intent are some of the common security issues that every cloud user is afraid of while shifting from a conventional network architecture to a cloud hosted infrastructure.

Cloud computing has thus, unsurprisingly, emerged as a salient area of interest for security researchers!

When the user data are uploaded or stored in a cloud computing service, the data owners are unlikely to know the path via which their data is being transmitted. The user is unknown of the fact whether the data is being collected, analyzed and accessed by a third party or not.

Thus, It is important to maintain a balance between privacy, legitimate surveillance and lawful data access, in order to ensure that the privacy of innocent individuals is not compromised.

A particularly promising approach to achieve security and privacy in this new computing paradigm is through Cryptography.

Thus, securing the “Cloud” by using the technique of “Cryptography” gives rise to a totally new security paradigm called Cloud Cryptography!

Cryptography in itself is a very strong technique used for end-to-end encryption for securing data transfer and storage. Provided Cloud is prone to some serious security threats, Cryptography is an excellent mechanism for securing data storage in cloud.

Thus, when potential of Cryptography is combined with Cloud Computing, it gives rise to a whole new niche to study and deal with!

Cloud Cryptography can be alternatively called as Crypto Cloud Computing. Crypto Cloud Computing is a new secure cloud computing architecture.

To construct a secure cloud computing system, security at infrastructure, service platforms and application software levels have to be studied for a secure cloud computing system. Information encryption is one of the most effective ways to ensure information security in cloud computing system. Traditionally, information encryption focuses on specified stages and operations, such as data encryption. For cloud computing, a system level design has to be implemented.(Source: Wikipedia)

Crypto cloud computing is a new secure cloud computing architecture. It can provide protection of information security at the system level, and allows users access to shared services conveniently and accurately. Crypto cloud computing protects individual’s connections with the outside world. It can protect the personal privacy without any delay of information exchange.

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