Publisher's Synopsis
Cloud computing standards are gaining an increased research interest due to various benefits they offer. The major benefits include time saving, cost-effectiveness and efficient utilization of computing resources. Though they are so many advantages with cloud computing, Security and privacy issues are the major issues holding back the extensive adaption of this technology. The general characteristic of cloud computing technology requires the customers to store their data at third party cloud service providers, which can also be termed as outsourcing of data. Since security and privacy of the data is generally handled by service providers, the data owners won't have any complete idea about these security challenges and solutions. Malicious nature of service provider is one more issue which cannot be traceable by data owners. Hence finding the appropriate solutions to these security issues at both administrator level and customer level is very attractive in various directions. Some of the earlier research focused on improving security at the operating system, application, Hardware or Virtual Machine levels. However these approaches don not able to provide compressive solutions and still they kept the privacy control under cloud service provider (CSP). Another direction of research is based on standard Encryption algorithms like Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), Data Encryption Standard (DES) etc. However the advancement in the technology makes these approaches ineffective. And also the deployment of cloud computing is operated in a distributed fashion in which there is no possibility of correct guess about the malicious nature of intermediate entities like administrator, users etc. In contrast the Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) is an emerging approach that aims to provide data owners with full control on their data and also provides an efficient management for the clod service provider. However the ABE based approaches either have security imperfections or provide security at the cost of execution. Therefore the challenge of achieving the dual goals of privacy preserving with effective cloud data sharing remains unresolved.
