Security and Privacy of Sensitive Data in Cloud Computing

Abstract: Cloud computing offers the prospect of on-demand, elastic computing, provided as a utility service, and it is revolutionizing many domains of computing. Compared with earlier methods of processing data, cloud computing environments provide significant benefits, such as the availability of automated tools to assemble, connect, configure and reconfigure virtualized resources on demand. These make it much easier to meet organizational goals as organizations can easily deploy cloud services. However, the shift in paradigm that accompanies the adoption of cloud computing is increasingly giving rise to security and privacy considerations relating to facets of cloud computing such as multi-tenancy, trust, loss of control and accountability. Consequently, cloud platforms that handle sensitive information are required to deploy technical measures and organizational safeguards to avoid data protection breakdowns that might result in enormous and costly damages. Sensitive information in the context of cloud computing encompasses data from a wide range of different areas and domains. Data concerning health is a typical example of the type of sensitive information handled in cloud computing environments, and it is obvious that most individuals will want information related to their health to be secure. Hence, with the growth of cloud computing in recent times, privacy and data protection requirements have been evolving to protect individuals against surveillance and data disclosure. Some examples of such protective legislation are the EU Data Protection Directive (DPD) and the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), both of which demand privacy preservation for handling personally identifiable information. There have been great efforts to employ a wide range of mechanisms to enhance the privacy of data and to make cloud platforms more secure. Techniques that have been used include: encryption, trusted platform module, secure multi-party computing, homomorphic encryption, anonymization, container and sandboxing technologies. However, it is still an open problem about how to correctly build usable privacy-preserving cloud systems to handle sensitive data securely due to two research challenges. First, existing privacy and data protection legislation demand strong security, transparency and audibility of data usage. Second, lack of familiarity with a broad range of emerging or existing security solutions to build efficient cloud systems. This dissertation focuses on the design and development of several systems and methodologies for handling sensitive data appropriately in cloud computing environments. The key idea behind the proposed solutions is enforcing the privacy requirements mandated by existing legislation that aims to protect the privacy of individuals in cloud-computing platforms. We begin with an overview of the main concepts from cloud computing, followed by identifying the problems that need to be solved for secure data management in cloud environments. It then continues with a description of background material in addition to reviewing existing security and privacy solutions that are being used in the area of cloud computing. Our first main contribution is a new method for modeling threats to privacy in cloud environments which can be used to identify privacy requirements in accordance with data protection legislation. This method is then used to propose a framework that meets the privacy requirements for handling data in the area of genomics. That is, health data concerning the genome (DNA) of individuals. Our second contribution is a system for preserving privacy when publishing sample availability data. This system is noteworthy because it is capable of cross-linking over multiple datasets. The thesis continues by proposing a system called ScaBIA for privacy-preserving brain image analysis in the cloud. The final section of the dissertation describes a new approach for quantifying and minimizing the risk of operating system kernel exploitation, in addition to the development of a system call interposition reference monitor for Lind - a dual sandbox.