AUTHENTICATED CLIENT PROVABLE DATA POSSESSION (AC-PDP) SECURITY SYSTEM FOR CLOUD COMPUTING

Abstract

Extensive research has been conducted in the field of cloud computing. Both the academia and researchers have envisioned a broad range of applications for cloud networks. Success measurement of emerging e-technological applications is gauged by their effectiveness; ease of use and most notably by the gradation of information security and control. Concerns pertaining to information security ascend as the world switches towards applications that run beyond the designated firewall/private domain and move closer towards the public domain. This thesis focuses on the design, implementation and analysis of a security protocol that fulfills the requirements of confidentiality, authentication and integrity in cloud environment. The proposed Authenticated Client Provable Data Possession (ACPDP) meets requirements of high level security without compromising client authentication. AC-PDP architecture is based on the asymmetric encryption schemes (i.e. RSA and ElGamal). The designed protocol must consume minimum amount of resources while providing high levels of security in a quick and optimal fashion. AC-PDP has been optimized by first eradicating the authentication overhead that incurs because of performing separate user authentication mechanism. The digital signature has been employed in such a way that it removes the need of running an independent authentication routine. In order to evaluate the system, several experiments have been carried out with respect to encryption/ decryption of various data blocks and integrity of file stored on server. Evaluation of AC-PDP has been done by conducting a comprehensive efficiency analysis of the proposed architecture. Furthermore, the result of execution time and memory usage for AC-PDP has been compared to its existing PDP scheme. To fully test AC-PDP it has been evaluated from various aspects like processing time, space utilization and security provision. The results have been obtained by implementing a client/server environment in .Net. Extensive testing of AC-PDP has shown that this new cloud security system is complete and ensures almost complete security over cloud network, in terms of integrity. AC-PDP has been evaluated in comparison with other vi protocols like PDP. The results demonstrate that AC-PDP has all the properties that are required by a highly acknowledged security protocol in cloud networks. The increased security offered by AC-PDP makes it a better choice as compared to the other PDP methods.