Enhancing Cloud Security: Secure and Auditable Data Sharing and its Implementation

In the context of community clouds where organizations store their codebases for employee access, the balance between security, anonymity, and accountability poses a significant challenge. Existing encryption methods effectively protect individual data, but issues arise in community data sharing, especially when access is set to anonymous, creating a vulnerability where rogue employees could exploit their anonymity to expose sensitive company data without traceability. The proposed system offers a transformative approach to cloud-based community data sharing, seeking to redefine the dynamics of security and privacy. Inspired by principles akin to blockchain, the key generation algorithm aims to strike a balance between anonymity and traceability, allowing authorized entities to identify users when necessary while preserving individual identities. At its core, the system advocates for a specific approach for key generation, mirroring the secure and decentralized flow found in blockchain. The key agreement protocol introduces an innovative approach that accommodates multiple participants, adapting to the evolving dynamics of a cloud environment. The shared key mechanism embedded in the system enhances accountability and traceability, with each user holding only a segment of the shared key. The proposed system incorporates robust authentication mechanisms, ensuring controlled access to cloud storage for permitted community members. A user-friendly interface facilitates seamless data upload and retrieval, with key management prioritized to secure the generation, storage, and distribution of encryption keys. Emphasis on user interface refinement enhances overall user experience and interaction. To integrate these advancements, the project involves leveraging AWS’s custom KMS to introduce a new key management protocol. This protocol involves breaking the block of the key into multiple parts and distributing them to the users. To validate the system’s functionality and ensure data security and privacy, a comprehensive testing and validation plan is outlined. The envisioned outcome is a robust, secure, and privacy-aware foundation for community data sharing in cloud environments, fostering collaboration and innovation with confidence. The proposed scheme aligns anonymity, traceability, and stringent security measures, envisioning a future where users can engage in collaborative endeavours with the assurance that their privacy and data security are of utmost importance.