A Protocol for Preventing Insider Attacks in Untrusted Infrastructure-as-a-Service Clouds

Recent technical advances in utility computing have allowed mall and medium sized businesses to move their applications to the cloud, to benefit from features such as auto-scaling and pay-as-you-go facilities. Before clouds are widely adopted, there is a need to address privacy concerns of customer data outsourced to these platforms. In this paper, we present a practical approach for protecting the confidentiality and integrity of client data and computation from insider attacks such as cloud clients as well as from the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) based cloud system administrator himself. We demonstrate a scenario of how the origin integrity and authenticity of health-care multimedia content processed on the cloud can be verified using digital watermarking in an isolated environment without revealing the watermark details to the cloud administrator. Finally to verify that our protocol does not compromise confidentiality and integrity of the client data and computation or degrade performance, we have tested a prototype system using two different approaches. Formal verification using ProVerif tool shows that cryptographic operations and protocol communication cannot be compromised using a realistic attacker model. Performance analysis of our implementation demonstrates that it adds negligible overhead.