Cloud Computing Security and Privacy -- A SAFE PROJECT

Constantly increasing amounts of data are being outsourced into the proverbial ``cloud'' due to the promise of massive cost savings and increased IT agility. This emerging computing paradigm essentially provides a new data sharing platform which needs to support a user base at large scale. There are also increasing evidences showing that cloud computing is gradually changing the way how we live, work, play, and learn - just imaging having access to nearly unlimited computing power from anywhere on any connected mobile devices (e.g., smartphones, laptops, and other mobile Internet devices).

In the foreseeable future, the cloud will host a huge amount of data from both public and private sectors. However, the full potential of cloud computing will not be realized until the issues related to cloud computing security are fully resolved. Especially, data security is considered as one of the most important security challenges that would raise great concerns from data owners when they outsource sensitive data for sharing on untrusted cloud servers which are unlikely to be in the same trusted domain of them. The untrusted nature of cloud servers, the potentially large scale of cloud services, and the need to support mobile users motivate the need for efficient, scalable, and fine-grained data control and sharing mechanisms.

In this project, we aim to develop security mechanisms for users to securely share resources across untrusted cloud providers, with a goal of achieving efficiency, scalability, and fine-grained data control and sharing. More specifically, we develop mechanisms to allow owners to specify complex access policies of their data for sharing across untrusted cloud providers. We also study various delegation mechanisms to outsource most expensive cryptographic functions from users, especially mobile users, to the cloud.

Related Publications:

Y. Zhu, D. Ma, and S. Wang
Secure Data Retrieval of Outsourced Data with Complex Query Support,
ICDCS Workshop on Security and Privacy in Cloud Computing (ICDCS-SPCC), 2012

Y. Zhu, H. Hu, G.-J. Ahn and M. Yu
Comparison-Based Encryption for Fine-grained Access Control in Clouds,
ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY), 2012.

D. Ma and G. Tsudik
IRRES: Intrusion Resilient Remote Email Storage,
ICDCS Workshop on Security and Privacy in Cloud Computing (ICDCS-SPCC), 2010

D. Ma
Intrusion Resilience for Unattended Devices,
PhD Dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 2009.

D. Ma and G. Tsudik
A New Approach to Secure Logging,
ACM Transactions on Storage, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2009.

D. Ma and G. Tsudik
A New Approach to Secure Logging,
IFIP WG11.3 Working Conference on Data and Applications Security (DBSec), 2008.

D. Ma
Practical forward secure sequential aggregate signatures,
ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS), 2008.

Last update: 8/17/2011. All rights reserved.
Report any problem to safe AT eng.umd.umich.edu