Protocols for Cloud Security

Nowadays, cloud service providers (CSPs), like Amazon, allow users to outsource the entire IT infrastructures to significantly reduce their cost for running businesses. This, however, brings severe security concerns due to the out‐of‐control nature of the cloud services. To ensure cloud security, various protocols have been designed in the literature. In this chapter, we review protocols for securing cloud data in two categories: the secure cloud computing and the secure cloud storage. For the secure computing, we review a few protocols which can support trusted computation in the untrusted cloud environment, including the homomorphic encryption, the searchable encryption, the ciphertext‐policy attribute‐based encryption, and the secure multiparty computation. For the secure cloud storage, we review protocols ensuring confidentiality, integrity, and reliability of the cloud data, which are defined as proofs of encryption (PoEs), proofs of storage (PoSs), and proofs of reliability, respectively. In addition, we briefly review protocols for securing cloud systems. Lastly, we discuss some potential future directions for cloud security.