IEEE 2013: Security and Privacy Enhancing Multi-Cloud Architectures

IEEE 2013 Transaction on Dependable and Secure Computing

Technology - Available in Java and Dot Net

Abstract—Security challenges are still amongst the biggest obstacles when considering the adoption of cloud services. This triggered a lot of research activities, resulting in a quantity of proposals targeting the various cloud security threats. Alongside with these security issues the cloud paradigm comes with a new set of unique features which open the path towards novel security approaches, techniques and architectures. This paper provides a survey on the achievable security merits by making use of multiple distinct clouds simultaneously. Various distinct architectures are introduced and discussed according to their security and privacy capabilities and prospects.

Index Terms—Cloud; Security; Privacy; Multi-Cloud; Application Partitioning; Tier Partitioning; Data Partitioning; Multi-party Computation

IEEE 2013: Scalable and Secure Sharing of Personal Health Records in Cloud Computing using Attribute-based Encryption

IEEE 2013 Transactions on Parallel & Distributed System

Technology- Available in Java and DotNet

Abstract—Personal health record (PHR) is an emerging patient-centric model of health information exchange, which is often outsourced to be stored at a third party, such as cloud providers. However, there have been wide privacy concerns as personal health information could be exposed to those third party servers and to unauthorized parties. To assure the patients’ control over access to their own PHRs, it is a promising method to encrypt the PHRs before outsourcing. Yet, issues such as risks of privacy exposure, scalability in key management, flexible access and efficient user revocation, have remained the most important challenges toward achieving fine-grained,  cryptographically enforced data access control. In this paper, we propose a novel patient-centric framework and a suite of mechanisms for data access control to PHRs stored in semi-trusted servers. To achieve fine-grained and scalable data access control for PHRs, we leverage attribute based encryption (ABE) techniques to encrypt each patient’s PHR file. Different from previous works in secure data outsourcing, we focus on the multiple data owner scenario, and divide the users in the PHR system into multiple security domains that greatly reduces the key management complexity for owners and users. A high degree of patient privacy is guaranteed simultaneously by exploiting multi-authority ABE. Our scheme also enables dynamic modification of access policies or file attributes, supports efficient on-demand user/attribute revocation and break-glass access under emergency scenarios. Extensive analytical and experimental results are presented which show the security, scalability and efficiency of our proposed scheme.

IEEE 2013: Govcloud: Using Cloud Computing in Public Organizations

IEEE 2013 TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY 

Technology - Available in Java and Dot Net

Governments are facing reductions in ICT budgets just as users are increasing demands for

electronic services. One solution announced aggressively by vendors is cloud computing. Cloud computing is not a new technology, but as described by Jackson [1] is a new way of offering services, taking into consideration business and economic models for providing and consuming ICT services. Here we explain the impact and benefits for public organizations of cloud services and explore issues of why governments are slow to literature does not cover this subject in detail, especially for European organizations.

IEEE 2013:Dynamic Resource Allocation using Virtual Machines for Cloud Computing Environment

IEEE 2013 Transactions on Parallel & Distributed Systems

Technology - Available in Java and Dot net

Abstract—Cloud computing allows business customers to scale up and down their resource usage based on needs. Many of the touted gains in the cloud model come from resource multiplexing through virtualization technology. In this paper, we present a system that uses virtualization technology to allocate data center resources dynamically based on application demands and support green computing by optimizing the number of servers in use. We introduce the concept of “skewness” to measure the unevenness in the multi-dimensional resource utilization of a server. By minimizing skewness, we can combine different types of workloads nicely and improve the overall utilization of server resources. We develop a set of heuristics that prevent overload in the system effectively while saving energy used. Trace driven simulation and experiment results demonstrate that our algorithm achieves good performance.