Abstract:
The Cloud Computing concept is still under development and is being hampered by problems that are preventing people from adopting it and advancing it. The biggest worry has been a lack of security in terms of data and information storage. A cloud provider server's integrity and confidentiality must be guaranteed by organizations and other entities, among other things. Solutions to improve security models have been looked at (strong authentication, encryption and storage fragmentation before storage, access control policies, etc.).
One of the desired of issue is data remanence which poses a serious risk. How can we be certain that data is actually and properly erased from remote systems when requested? Due to the virtualization technology used in the cloud infrastructure, traditional methods for diminishing data remanence are not enough. Since the data is not stored only on a tangible device like a hard disk at one location/physical machine, but on multiple virtual machines located across the globe. Our work here includes the background and introduction to cloud as well as how data remanence is prevalent in it enough, to raise concern for data security. We propose an improved auditing model that works on seven aspects of the cloud to help prevent or remove data remanence in the cloud computing paradigm. These aspects range from the usage of traditional methods of sanitizing devices in conjunction with techniques, like encryption and ensured data deletion. Our model provides solution for the data security and confidentiality concerns when it comes to the residual data being present in a public cloud. We also analyze the proposed model in light of an eHealth case study. The security concerns in an eHealth cloud are mentioned and how those concerns can be tackled with a performance evaluation using our model. Our future work will be to create a public cloud and visualize our auditing model in a real-time environment to get better results.
