User-Controlled Security Mechanism in Data-Centric Clouds

In recent years, cloud computing is no doubt one of the most-talked-about terms in both the industry and academic worlds. In clouds, resources are delivered as services over the Internet in a pay-as-you-go fashion. By leasing cloud platforms to run their business, startups can achieve cost-saving and scale-up elasticity without being concerned about over-provisioning or under-provisioning for a service. Although cloud computing has many benefits, its unique features, such as multi-tenancy and the separation of data administration and data ownership, also raise many security and privacy problems, which have been recognized as the primary concerns hindering clouds´ wide adoption. This paper aims to investigate security and privacy issues in cloud computing, and attempts to identify possible solutions for preserving cloud security. Specifically, we focus on data-centric security, which mainly refers to ensuring data confidentiality, in cloud computing. As an alternative solution to alleviate the risk of data leakage in cloud environments, we provide a user-controlled security mechanism, where the data is depicted with three dimensions on demand, and will be encapsulated in an onion way. The proposed mechanism allows customers to take the initiative to protect their own data. We believe this flexibility could prove to be a major improvement in cloud security if implemented well.