A privacy preserving repository for securing data across the cloud

Popularity of cloud computing is increasing day by day in distributed computing environment. There is a growing trend of using cloud environments for storage and data processing needs. Cloud computing is an Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand. However, adopting a cloud computing paradigm may have positive as well as negative effects on the data security of service consumers. This paper primarily highlights some major security issues existing in current cloud computing environments. The primary issue that has to be dealt with when talking about data security in a cloud is protection of the data. The idea is to construct a privacy preserving repository where data sharing services can update and control the access and limit the usage of their shared data, instead of submitting data to central authorities, and, hence, the repository will promote data sharing and privacy of data. This paper aims at simultaneously achieving data confidentiality while still keeping the harmonizing relations intact in the cloud. Our proposed scheme enables the data owner to delegate most of computation intensive tasks to cloud servers without disclosing data contents or user access privilege information.