Securing Data in a Cloud Environment: Access Control, Encryption, and Immutability

Abstract: The amount of data and the development of new technologies used by all society-critical organizations are increasing dramatically. In parallel, data breaches, cyber-attacks, and their devastating consequences are also on the rise, as well as the number of individuals and organizations that are potential targets for such attacks. This places higher demands on security in terms of protecting data against cyber-attacks and controlling access to data that authenticated users want to access. The paper focuses on studying concepts of secure data practices in a GitLab-based cloud environment. The objective is to give answers to questions such as how to ensure the guarantee of secure data and protect it from unauthorized access and changes. The work behind this thesis includes exploring techniques for access control, data encryption, and data immutability. The study is followed by an implementation project that includes fetching code from GitLab verifying user identity and access control, managing data access, and displaying the results. The results of the thesis demonstrate the effectiveness of the implemented security measures in protecting data and controlling access.