AnonymousCloud: A Data Ownership Privacy Provider Framework in Cloud Computing

A means of reliably concealing ownership of cloud data without impeding computation over the data is presented and evaluated. This facilitates information privacy enforcement in cloud environments by withholding data ownership information from cloud nodes that compute using the data. As a result, nodes that have access to private data in unencrypted form do not know who owns it, what role their computations play in the larger computational task, or to whom their computation results are ultimately delivered. To provide this data ownership privacy, the cloud's distributed computing resources are leveraged to implement an anonymizing circuit based on Tor, through which users submit private data and jobs. A tunable parameter k controls a trade-off between the degree of anonymity and the computational overhead imposed by the system. Anonymous authentication based on publickey cryptography safely links jobs and data to customers for billing purposes without revealing these associations to untrusted computation nodes. Simulation results demonstrate the potency of the system in presence of attackers.