Message-Locked Searchable Encryption: A New Versatile Tool for Secure Cloud Storage

<span lang="EN-US">Cloud Computing is the ability to improve the utility or train new human resources without investing in new infrastructure, or add capabilities to existence without the latest software licensing. It expanded the capabilities of Information Technology (IT). From the past few years, cloud computing has developed from a good business concept in the best rising sectors of the IT industry. But more information on individuals and companies was put in the cloud, and concerns began to think about how secure the cloud environment was. Despite cloud surrounding structures, enterprise users still do not want to expand their business in the cloud. Security reduces the growth of cloud computing and continues to spread the market with complexity with data privacy and data protection. The security of cloud computing has constantly been an significant aspect of improved quality of service from cloud service providers. Data storage in the cloud has a problem related to data security. However, cloud computing construct many new security challenges which have not been well examine. In order to ensure that the user's data in the cloud is secure, we have proposed an effective mechanism with a distinctive feature of data integrity and privacy. This paper focusing on problems relating to the cloud data storage techniques and security in virtual environment. We recommend a method for providing data storage and security in cloud using public key Cryptosystem, which uses the concept of the modified RSA algorithm to provide better security for the data stored in the cloud. </span>

Purpose The authors argue that the current studies about malicious insiders confuse the fact that malicious attacks belong to two different categories, namely, those that launch instrumental attacks and expressive attacks. The authors collect malicious insider data from publicly available sources and use text-mining techniques to analyze the association between malicious insiders’ characteristics and the different types of attack. Design/methodology/approach The authors investigated the relationship between personality characteristics and different types of malicious attacks. For the personality characteristics, the authors use the same method as Liang et al. (2016), which extracted these characteristics based on a keyword-characteristic dictionary. For different types of malicious attacks, two raters rated each case based on criteria modified from criminology research to determine the degree of expressiveness and instrumentality. Findings The results show that malicious insiders who are manipulative or seeking personal gain tend to carry out instrumental attacks. Malicious insiders who are arrogant tend to conduct expressive attacks. Research limitations/implications This study uses third party articles to identify the personality characteristics of known malicious insiders. As such, not all personality characteristics may have been reported. Data availability was an issue. Practical implications Understanding if different personality characteristics lead different types of attacks can help managers identify employees who exhibit them and mitigate an attack before it occurs. Social implications Malicious insider attacks can have devastating results on businesses and employees. Help to identify potential malicious insiders before they act, may prevent undue harm. Originality/value This study used 132 cases of none malicious insiders to examine their attack objectives. No other study that the authors know of used that many cases.

According to Cisco Global Cloud Index, cloud storage users will store 1.6 Gigabytes data per month by 2019, compared to 992 megabytes data per month in 2014. With this trend, it has been shown that more and more data will reside in cloud storage and it is expected to grow further. As cloud storage is becoming an option for users for keeping their data online, it comes with security concerns for protecting data from threats. This thesis addresses the need to investigate the security factors that will enable efficient security protection for data in cloud storage and the relationships that exist between the different security factors. Consequently, this research has developed a conceptual framework that supports security in cloud storage. The main contribution of this research is the development of a Cloud Storage Security Framework (CSSF) to support an integrative approach to understanding and evaluating security in cloud storage. The framework enables understanding of the makeup of security in cloud storage and measures the understanding of security in cloud storage. Drawing upon established theories and prior research findings, the framework indicates that security in cloud storage can be determined by nine factors: (1) security policies implementation in cloud storage, security measure that relates to (2) protecting the data accessed in cloud storage; (3) modifications of data stored; (4) accessibility of data stored in cloud storage; (5) non-repudiation to the data stored; (6) authenticity of the original data; (7) reliability of the cloud storage services; (8) accountability of service provision; and (9) auditability of the data accessed and stored in cloud storage. An example of CSSF application has been demonstrated through the development of a measuring instrument called Security Rating Score (SecRaS) and through a series of experiments, SecRaS has been validated and used in a research scenario. The instrument consists of several items generated using goal-question-metric approach. These potential items were evaluated by a series of experiments; the security experts assessed using content validity ratio while the security practitioners took part in the validation study. The validation study completed two experiments that look into the correlation analyses and internal reliability. SecRaS instrument was later applied in a research scenario; the validated instrument was distributed and a number of 218 usable responses were received. Using structural equation modelling, the data has revealed a good fit of the measurement analyses and structural model. The key findings were as follow: the relationships between factors were found to have both direct and indirect effects in the result. While establishing the relationship(s) among the factors, the structural model proposes three types of causal relationships in terms of how the security implementation in cloud storage could be affected by the security factors. This thesis presents a detailed discussion of the CSSF development, confirmation, and application in a research scenario. For security managers, CSSF offers a new paradigm on how stakeholders can make cloud storage security implementation successful in some depth. For security practitioners, the CSSF enables deconstruction of the concept of security in cloud storage into smaller, conceptually distinct and manageable factors to guide the design of security in cloud storage. For researchers, the CSSF provides a common framework in which to conceptualise their research and make it easier to see how the security factors fit into the larger picture.

By only storing a unique copy of duplicate data possessed by different data owners, deduplication can significantly reduce storage cost, and hence is used broadly in public clouds. When combining with confidentiality, deduplication will become problematic as encryption performed by different data owners may differentiate identical data which may then become not deduplicable. The Message-Locked Encryption (MLE) is thus utilized to derive the same encryption key for the identical data, by which the encrypted data are still deduplicable after being encrypted by different data owners. As keys may be leaked over time, re-encrypting outsourced data is of paramount importance to ensure continuous confidentiality, which, however, has not been well addressed in the literature. In this paper, we design SEDER, a SEcure client-side Deduplication system enabling Efficient Re-encryption for cloud storage by (1) leveraging all-or-nothing transform (AONT), (2) designing a new delegated re-encryption (DRE), and (3) proposing a new proof of ownership scheme for encrypted cloud data (PoWC). Security analysis and experimental evaluation validate security and efficiency of SEDER, respectively.

Cloud storage is becoming an option for users in keeping their data online, but it comes with the security threats and challenges of protecting their data from threats. Many security frameworks have been suggested by existing studies, governing bodies, industry standards etc. as guidelines to be implemented by cloud service providers (CSPs) but the complete set of controls cannot be fully implemented due to several challenges such as decreasing availability, less user convenience, need of a robust infrastructure etc. Therefore, there is a need to investigate the security requirements and threats which will enable efficient security protection to protect data in cloud storage. This paper will discuss security requirements and analyses existing cloud security threats. The threats will be modelled in a cloud storage scenario. Future work will involve confirming the security framework using a triangulation method. This will involve confirming the idea with experts and simulations of the designated security requirements on cloud storage that will be used to test the framework.

There are different types of adversarial attacks and defences for machine learning algorithms which makes assessing the robustness of an algorithm a daunting task. Moreover, there is an intrinsic bias in these adversarial attacks and defences to make matters worse. Here, we organise the problems faced: a) Model Dependence, b) Insufficient Evaluation, c) False Adversarial Samples, and d) Perturbation Dependent Results. Based on this, we propose a model agnostic adversarial robustness assessment method based on L0 and L∞ distance-based norms and the concept of robustness levels to tackle the problems. We validate our robustness assessment on several neural network architectures (WideResNet, ResNet, AllConv, DenseNet, NIN, LeNet and CapsNet) and adversarial defences for image classification problem. The proposed robustness assessment reveals that the robustness may vary significantly depending on the metric used (i.e., L0 or L∞). Hence, the duality should be taken into account for a correct evaluation. Moreover, a mathematical derivation and a counter-example suggest that L1 and L2 metrics alone are not sufficient to avoid spurious adversarial samples. Interestingly, the threshold attack of the proposed assessment is a novel L∞ black-box adversarial method which requires even more minor perturbation than the One-Pixel Attack (only 12% of One-Pixel Attack’s amount of perturbation) to achieve similar results. We further show that all current networks and defences are vulnerable at all levels of robustness, suggesting that current networks and defences are only effective against a few attacks keeping the models vulnerable to different types of attacks.

Intrusion detection System forms a vital component of internet security. To keep pace with the growing trends, there is a critical need to replace single layer detection technology with multi layer detection. Different types of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks thwart authorized users from gaining access to the networks and we tried to detect as well as alleviate some of those attacks. In this paper, we have proposed a novel cross layer intrusion detection architecture to discover the malicious nodes and different types of DoS attacks by exploiting the information available across different layers of protocol stack in order to improve the accuracy of detection. We have used cooperative anomaly intrusion detection with data mining technique to enhance the proposed architecture. We have implemented fixed width clustering algorithm for efficient detection of the anomalies in the MANET traffic and also generated different types of attacks in the network. The simulation of the proposed architecture is performed in OPNET simulator and we got the result as we expected.

In a present-day world there are different types of attacks being launched on computing devices. World is experiencing more and more cyber-attacks and types of attacks are also increasing. For example, an IoT device in a home network can act as a botnet attacking other devices or there could be man in the middle attack. As time goes by more and more devices are being connected within any given network. All these devices will be vulnerable to attacks if any one of the devices is compromised within the network. This complicates Intrusion Detection in any given network. Manual detection and intervention is nearly impossible. Hence it is quintessential to detect different types of attacks with more confidence with less computation complexity and time. A lot of research work has already been done in this area where the attacks have been studied separately. In this paper we focus on detecting intrusions including IoT botnet attacks and other types of network attacks. To achieve this, we build a multiclass classification using supervised learning models along with the dimensionality reduction technique. Numerous studies on ML-based IDS have been using KDD or the upgraded versions of KDD dataset. In this study we used a new dataset, IoT network Intrusion Detection dataset.

Cloud computing is becoming increasingly important for provision of services and storage of data in the Internet. However there are several significant challenges in securing cloud infrastructures from different types of attacks. The focus of this paper is on the security services that a cloud provider can offer as part of its infrastructure to its customers (tenants) to counteract these attacks. Our main contribution is a security architecture that provides a flexible security as a service model that a cloud provider can offer to its tenants and customers of its tenants. Our security as a service model while offering a baseline security to the provider to protect its own cloud infrastructure also provides flexibility to tenants to have additional security functionalities that suit their security requirements. The paper describes the design of the security architecture and discusses how different types of attacks are counteracted by the proposed architecture. We have implemented the security architecture and the paper discusses analysis and performance evaluation results.

With the rapid developments occurring in cloud computing and services, there has been a growing trend to use the cloud for large-scale data storage. This has raised the important security issue of how to control and prevent unauthorized access to data stored in the cloud. One well known access control model is the role-based access control (RBAC), which provides flexible controls and management by having two mappings, users to roles and roles to privileges on data objects. In this paper, we propose a role-based encryption (RBE) scheme that integrates the cryptographic techniques with RBAC. Our RBE scheme allows RBAC policies to be enforced for the encrypted data stored in public clouds. Based on the proposed scheme, we present a secure RBE-based hybrid cloud storage architecture that allows an organization to store data securely in a public cloud, while maintaining the sensitive information related to the organization's structure in a private cloud. We describe a practical implementation of the proposed RBE-based architecture and discuss the performance results. We demonstrate that users only need to keep a single key for decryption, and system operations are efficient regardless of the complexity of the role hierarchy and user membership in the system.

Physical location of data in cloud storage is an increasingly urgent problem. In a short time, it has evolved from the concern of a few regulated businesses to an important consideration for many cloud storage users. One of the characteristics of cloud storage is fluid transfer of data both within and among the data centres of a cloud provider. However, this has weakened the guarantees with respect to control over data replicas, protection of data in transit and physical location of data. This paper addresses the lack of reliable solutions for data placement control in cloud storage systems. We analyse the currently available solutions and identify their shortcomings. Furthermore, we describe a high-level architecture for a trusted, geolocation-based mechanism for data placement control in distributed cloud storage systems, which are the basis of an on-going work to define the detailed protocol and a prototype of such a solution. This mechanism aims to provide granular control over the capabilities of tenants to access data placed on geographically dispersed storage units comprising the cloud storage.

The Cloud computing technology is a concept of providing online multiple resources in the scalable and reliable method. The user will access cloud service as per their requirement of computing level. There is no capital expenditure involved in computing resources for cloud user. The users have to pay as per their storage, network and service usage. The cloud computing have some highlighted issues like compliance, cross border data storage issues, multi-tenant and down time issues. The most important issues are related to storage of data in cloud. Data confidentiality, data integrity, data authentication and regulations on data protection are major problems that affect user’s business. This paper discusses about encryption and decryption data security issues in cloud and its safety measures and comes out with a novel research work of cloud data security model.

The rapid adoption of cloud computing has transformed the way data is stored, shared, and accessed across organizationsand individuals. Despite its scalability and cost efficiency, cloud storage introduces serious security and privacy challenges, particularly when sensitive data is outsourced to third-party cloud service providers. Traditional access control mechanisms often rely on the cloud provider’s trustworthiness, which may expose data to unauthorized access, insider threats, and data breaches. To address these concerns, CryptCloud+ is proposed as a secure and expressive data access control framework that enforces fine-grained authorization directly through cryptographic techniques. CryptCloud+ focuses on ensuring data confidentiality while enabling flexible and policy-driven access control over encrypted cloud data. The system leverages encryption-based access control, where data is encrypted before being uploaded to the cloud, and only authorized users possessing valid cryptographic credentials can decrypt and access the data. This approach eliminates the need to trust the cloud service provider, as all sensitive operations related to data access are handled at the client side. A key contribution of CryptCloud+ is its support for expressive access policies, allowing data owners to define complex rules based on user attributes such as roles, departments, access levels, or time constraints. These policies enable fine grained access control without requiring data owners to manage individual permissions manually. The framework ensures that users can access only the data they are authorized for, while unauthorized users, including cloud administrators, are unable to infer any meaningful information from the encrypted data. The proposed system is implemented using Python, taking advantage of its robust cryptographic libraries, simplicity, and integration capabilities. Python-based modules handle key generation, encryption, decryption, and policy enforcement, making the system modular and easy to extend. The implementation demonstrates how secure key management and attribute-based access enforcement can be achieved efficiently in a real-world cloud environment. CryptCloud+ also addresses scalability and performance concerns by minimizing computation overhead during data access. Encryption and decryption operations are optimized to ensure that system performance remains practical even as the number of users and data files increases. Experimental results indicate that the framework maintains strong security guarantees while providing acceptable response times for authorized users. In addition to security, the system enhances usability by allowing seamless data sharing among multiple users without re encrypting data for each individual. This significantly reduces management complexity for data owners while preserving strict access control policies. The system design ensures compatibility with existing cloud storage services, making itadaptable to various deployment scenarios. Overall, CryptCloud+ presents a secure, flexible, and effiient solution for cloud data access control. By combining cryptographic enforcement with expressive policy definition and Python-based implementation, the frameworkstrengthens data security, protects user privacy, and improves trust in cloud storage systems. The proposed model demonstrates the feasibility of practical, cryptography-driven access control for modern cloud environments.

As the demand for data sharing and complex access-control policies continues to grow, traditional encryption mechanisms, which are generally established using a Public Key Infrastructure, face the problem of massive processing overheads and huge network bandwidth consumption. Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) schemes have been proposed as a potential means of addressing these issues and have attracted great attention in recent years. Most previous studies on ABE focus on issues such as the revocation mechanism, multi-authority, the access structure design, and traceability. However, very few studies consider the storage efficiency problem and the present study proposes a novel data deduplication scheme based on ciphertext-policy ABE with convergent encryption and block-level data. The scheme can be deployed in third-party semi-trusted environments, and not only provides flexible, fine-grained access control over encrypted data, but also allows for the in-line elimination of redundancies in order to save cloud storage space. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme has an acceptable computational overhead and provides a promising solution for real-world data cloud storage and access scenarios.

A dynamic integrity verification scheme of cloud storage data based on lattice and Bloom filter