A SURVEY ON USER DATA SECURITY IN CLOUD COMPUTING: MECHANISMS AND ISSUES

Abstract

In the past few years Cloud Computing has really emerged as a technology. It provides the user with multiple functionalities and services such as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and PaaS (Platform as a Service), SaaS (Software as a Service). There are various aspects to this such as authentication, authorization, confidentiality and integrity which together are composed under security. Security aspect / parameter is very essential whenever we talk about cloud computing. It is very important that the user’s data is secure whenever we store / process it over the cloud. There is always a risk of various types of attacks in any form when we work with a cloud. Many researchers have been carried out for improvising cloud security. Also, a lot of work has been done to improve and enhance the cloud security. Examples of such works are multi-level authentication, hybrid encryption techniques using multiple algorithms, homomorphic encryption techniques, dedicated gateway & channel models for encryption & decryption purposes, cipher text fragmentation, multi-agent cloud systems, hybrid cryptography algorithms, advanced steganography approaches, enhanced data slicing methodologies, etc. But still there are still some loopholes which need to be acknowledged when cloud’s security is concerned. In this paper, we are going to review and hence discuss all the types of work which has been carried out to improve the security of the cloud. And we will then design our proposed system in which we will analyze their loopholes and will figure out some way as our proposed system in which we will try to overcome these loopholes and drawbacks. We would study, understand and analyze every approach in depth so that we can design an efficient system which will try to cover most of the drawbacks of the existing systems and hence propose an architecture which will provide a much reliable, efficient and optimized security to the user while working with cloud applications.