A FRAMEWORK ASSURING DECENTRALIZED ACCOUNTABILITY INTHE CLOUD

Thasni T, P. Mohamed Shameem

Abstract: Cloud computing enables on-demand and convenient network access to a shared pool of resources. One of the major characteristics of theservices in thecloud leads to an important problem in the cloud computing scenario. That is, user’s data are processed on unknown remote servers which are not under the control of service owner. Multiple users want to do business of their data or application using cloud, but their fears of losing control over their data or application become an obstacle to the popularity of services of cloud. Data owners must get information that their data is not misused on the cloud. To address these problems, here proposes a decentralized framework to monitor the actual usage of the user’s data available on the cloud. The proposed framework in this work performs automated logging and distributed auditing of relevant access performed by other entity, occurred at any time, at any cloud provider. The service model considered in this work is software as a service. The methodology includes an object centered approach that uses programmable capabilities of JAR to create an object that contains service owner’s policies and data. When the data are accessed by any external entity, logging mechanism is triggered automatically at that moment itself. Automatic JAR checking is also done to verify the trustworthiness of the cloud server. Data encryption technique, policy checking and technique to prevent modification of JAR are the important features of this framework.

Keywords: accountability, auditing, automatic JAR checking, cloud computing, integrity checking, logging, log records, service owner

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2014.0319032