A Policy-Based Security Framework for Storage and Computation on Enterprise Data in the Cloud

A whole range of security concerns that can act as barriers to the adoption of cloud computing have been identified by researchers over the last few years. While outsourcing its business-critical data and computations to the cloud, an enterprise loses control over them. How should the organization decide what security measures to apply to protect its data and computations that have different security requirements from a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) with an unknown level of corruption? The answer to this question relies on the organization's perception about the CSP's trustworthiness and the security requirements of its data. This paper proposes a decentralized, dynamic and evolving policy-based security framework that helps an organization to derive such perceptions from knowledgeable and trusted employee roles and based on that, choose the most relevant security policy specifying the security measures necessary for outsourcing data and computations to the cloud. The organizational perception is built through direct user participation and is allowed to evolve over time.