A decentralized accountability framework for enhancing secure data sharing through ICM in cloud

Abstract

The Cloud substitutes a computing criterion where shared configurable resources are afforded as an on-demand service over the Internet. Moreover, the cloud environment provides resources to the users on the basis of services like SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. Generally, a cloud can be referred as private cloud or public cloud. When a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) imposes upon public cloud resources to compile their private cloud, the result is demonstrated as a virtual private cloud. Private or public, the imperious intent of cloud computing is to provide simplistic, reliable usage of various computing resources. One of the significant features of cloud is that the outsourced data are accessed through any anonymous machines over the Internet. On the other hand, it creates an issue that user’s fear of unknown access of data, which can become a major difficulty to the wide implementation of cloud. In this paper, a decentralized accountability framework is developed to monitor the actual usage and access of the data that is shared on cloud. For that, a logging mechanism that includes authentication for each user to access the data has also been provided. Moreover, some procedures for providing the data under the control of data owner includes Integrity Checking Mechanism (ICM) have also been developed. The overall process strengthens the security constraints over cloud. And the experimental results reveal that the approach affords secure and scalable data sharing with reduced memory utilization and processing time.