Secure Data Sharing and Processing in Heterogeneous Clouds

Bojan Suzic,Andreas Reiter,Florian Reimair,Daniele Venturi,Baldur Kubo

doi:10.1016/j.procs.2015.09.228

Abstract

Abstract The extensive cloud adoption among the European Public Sector Players empowered them to own and operate a range of cloud infrastructures. These deployments vary both in the size and capabilities, as well as in the range of employed technologies and processes. The public sector, however, lacks the necessary technology to enable effective, interoperable and secure integration of a multitude of its computing clouds and services. In this work we focus on the federation of private clouds and the approaches that enable secure data sharing and processing among the collaborating infrastructures and services of public entities. We investigate the aspects of access control, data and security policy languages, as well as cryptographic approaches that enable fine-grained security and data processing in semi-trusted environments. We identify the main challenges and frame the future work that serve as an enabler of interoperability among heterogeneous infrastructures and services. Our goal is to enable both security and legal conformance as well as to facilitate transparency, privacy and effectivity of private cloud federations for the public sector needs.

Highlights

The emergence of cloud services provided many benefits to organizations, including the possibility to consolidate infrastructures and allow for structured and efficient deployment of services
The federation of private clouds should ensure the interoperability of various layers of infrastructures and collaborations. It should comply with the range of security, legal and assurance requirements that deal with the data sharing and processing, satisfying particular requirements of public administrations
In the scope of this work we focus on main enablers that will facilitate the secure and transparent federation of private clouds in the public sector

Summary

Introduction

The emergence of cloud services provided many benefits to organizations, including the possibility to consolidate infrastructures and allow for structured and efficient deployment of services. The federation of private clouds should ensure the interoperability of various layers of infrastructures and collaborations It should comply with the range of security, legal and assurance requirements that deal with the data sharing and processing, satisfying particular requirements of public administrations. In the scope of this work we focus on main enablers that will facilitate the secure and transparent federation of private clouds in the public sector. These include models and architectures for access control in distributed environments, data and security policy languages and cryptographic methods and services that support secure and efficient storage and processing of data in distributed and semi-trusted systems. The topics of interoperability and trust in heterogeneous systems are approached by the more recent project such as InterTrust and A4Cloud, which focus on dynamic secure policies and accountability in the cloud

Objectives

Discussion

Conclusion