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An Approach for Preserving Privacy and Protecting Personally Identifiable Information in Cloud Computing

Privacy and security in cloud computing is an important concern for both the public and private sector. Cloud computing allows the use of internet-based services to support business process and rental of ITservices on a utility-like basis. While cloud computing offers a massive concentration of resources, it poses risks for privacy preservation. The expected loss from a single breach can be significant and the heterogeneity of “users” represents an opportunity of multiple, collaborative threats. Problems associated with trusted 3 party managed Cloud Computing stem from loss of control, lack of trust (mechanisms) and multi-tenancy. Identity management (IDM) is one of the core components in cloud privacy and security and can help alleviate some of the problems associated with cloud computing. Cloud computing requires a user-centric access control where every user’s request for any provider is accompanied with the user identity and entitlement information. The system creates digital identities for its users, and protects the users’ Personally Identifiable Information (PII). User identity has identifiers or attributes that constitute PII, which identifies and defines the user. The identity is portable although tied to a domain. This user-centric approach gives the users the ultimate control of their digital identities. A review of the available privacy-enhancing solutions shows that there is a lack of standard system that address all the privacy issues in cloud computing. Cloud computing can benefit from the ownercentric mechanism for protecting privacy of sensitive data throughout their entire lifecycle. We discuss and propose approaches for privacy preservation in the cloud that does not use a trusted third party. The components of the proposed approach are: (i) use of active bundle—which is a middleware agent that includes data, privacy policies and a virtual machine that enforces the policies and use a set of protection mechanisms (i.e., integrity check, apoptosis, evaporation, decoy) to protect itself, as a container for PII; (ii) use of active bundle to mediates interactions between the user and cloud services using user’s privacy policies; and (ii) use of predicate over encrypted data computing when negotiating a use of a cloud service.