Data confidentiality using fragmentation in cloud computing
International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications
ISSN: 1742-7371
Article publication date: 29 March 2013
Abstract
Purpose
The aim of this research is to secure the sensitive outsourced data with minimum encryption within the cloud provider. Unfaithful solutions for providing privacy and security along with performance issues by encryption usage of outsourced data are the main motivation points of this research.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper presents a method for secure and confidential storage of data in the cloud environment based on fragmentation. The method supports minimal encryption to minimize the computations overhead due to encryption. The proposed method uses normalization of relational databases, tables are categorized based on user requirements relating to performance, availability and serviceability, and exported to XML as fragments. After defining the fragments and assigning the appropriate confidentiality levels, the lowest number of Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) is used required to store all fragments that must remain unlinkable in separate locations.
Findings
Particularly in the cloud databases are sometimes de‐normalised (their normal form is decreased to lower level) to increase the performance.
Originality/value
The paper proposes a methodology to minimize the need for encryption and instead focus on making data entities unlinkable so that even in the case of a security breach for one set of data, the privacy impact on the whole is limited. The paper would be relevant to those people whose main concern is to preserve data privacy in distributed systems.
Keywords
Citation
Hudic, A., Islam, S., Kieseberg, P., Rennert, S. and Weippl, E.R. (2013), "Data confidentiality using fragmentation in cloud computing", International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications, Vol. 9 No. 1, pp. 37-51. https://doi.org/10.1108/17427371311315743
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2013, Emerald Group Publishing Limited