Abstract

We propose a secure cloud storage model that addresses security and storage issues for cloud computing environments. Security is achieved by anonymous authentication which ensures that cloud users remain anonymous while getting duly authenticated. For achieving this goal, we propose a digital signature based authentication scheme with a decentralized architecture for distributed key management with multiple Key Distribution Centers. Homomorphic encryption scheme using Paillier public key cryptosystem is used for encrypting the data that is stored in the cloud. We incorporate a query driven approach for validating the access policies defined by an individual user for his/her data i.e. the access is granted to a requester only if his credentials matches with the hidden access policy. Further, since data is vulnerable to losses or damages due to the vagaries of the network, we propose an automatic retrieval mechanism where lost data is recovered by data replication and file replacement with string matching algorithm. We describe a prototype implementation of our proposed model.