Security-aware intermediate data placement strategy in scientific cloud workflows

Abstract

Massive computation power and storage capacity of cloud computing systems allow scientists to deploy data-intensive applications without the infrastructure investment, where large application datasets can be stored in the cloud. Based on the pay-as-you-go model, data placement strategies have been developed to cost-effectively store large volumes of generated datasets in the scientific cloud workflows. As promising as it is, this paradigm also introduces many new challenges for data security when the users outsource sensitive data for sharing on the cloud servers, which are not within the same trusted domain as the data owners. This challenge is further complicated by the security constraints on the potential sensitive data for the scientific workflows in the cloud. To effectively address this problem, we propose a security-aware intermediate data placement strategy. First, we build a security overhead model to reasonably measure the security overheads incurred by the sensitive data. Second, we develop a data placement strategy to dynamically place the intermediate data for the scientific workflows. Finally, our experimental results show that our strategy can effectively improve the intermediate data security while ensuring the data transfer time during the execution of scientific workflows.