Securing Cloud Storage Service

Abstract: Cloud computing brought flexibility, scalability, and capital cost savings to the IT industry. As more companies turn to cloud solutions, securing cloud based services becomes increasingly important, because for many organizations, the final barrier to adopting cloud computing is whether it is sufficiently secure. More users rely on cloud storage as it is mainly because cloud storage is available to be used by multiple devices (e.g. smart phones, tablets, notebooks, etc.) at the same time. These services often offer adequate protection to user's private data. However, there were cases where user's private data was accessible to other users, since this data is stored in a multi-tenant environment. These incidents reduce the trust of cloud storage service providers, hence there is a need to securely migrate data from one cloud storage provider to another. This thesis proposes a design of a service for providing Security as a Service for cloud brokers in a federated cloud. This scheme allows customers to securely migrate from one provider to another. To enable the design of this scheme, possible security and privacy risks of a cloud storage service were analysed and identified. Moreover, in order to successfully protect private data, data protection requirements (for data retention, sanitization, and processing) were analysed. The proposed service scheme utilizes various encryption techniques and also includes identity and key management mechanisms, such as "federated identity management". While our proposed design meets most of the defined security and privacy requirements, it is still unknown how to properly handle data sanitization, to meet data protection requirements, and provide users data recovery capabilities (backups, versioning, etc.).