Cloud Computing Environment To Self-destruct Mechanism

With the rapid development of cloud computing, more and more services and applications are emerging in the Internet, which makes exposing user sensitive data in the environment of cloud computing to become easy. In this thesis, the cloud service provider is treated as a potential attacker. Since the data is stored in the cloud, we cannot confirm whether the cloud service provider have cleaned the system files, directories, and database records related to a cloud user before those cloud resources are re-assigned to other cloud users.Our research goal is to protect a user's archived sensitive data in cloud computing. In this thesis, a secure self-destructing scheme for electronic data (SSDD for short) in cloud computing is proposed, so that the user sensitive data can be automatically destructed after a period of time without any explicit delete operation by the user or any third parties. This goal is achieved by first encrypting the data into a ciphertext. Then, we associate the ciphertext, and extract a part of the ciphertext to make the ciphertext to become incomplete. Finally, both the decryption key and a part of the ciphertext are distributed into the distributed hash table (DHT) network. In order to recover the user sensitive data before the pre-configured period of time, both the decryption key and a part of the ciphertext must be recovered from the DHT network.By security analysis, we show that our SSDD scheme can resist against not only the attacks in the DHT network, such as the store sniffing attack, the lookup sniffing attack, and the standard DHT attacks, but also the traditional cryptanalysis and the brute-force attacks.This self-destructing mechanism is an extremely effective solution for the residue problem of the user sensitive data in cloud computing. In the environment of cloud computing, the user sensitive data may be permanently stored in the cloud services, even if the cloud user explicitly sends command to delete his data, or the cloud user does not use the cloud server anymore. With this self-destructing mechanism, the cloud users can control the life-time of their sensitive data easily. Without manual intervention, the sensitive data in cloud computing will be automatically destroyed after the expiration time.