Security and Privacy in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing, or computing as a utility, is a new computing paradigm. It allows third party service providers (i.e. cloud service providers) to provide a centralized pool of configurable computing resources to end-users. The end-users (individuals and enterprises) could make on-demand accesses to these resources and use them to implement their services according to their ever-changing requirements. In this way, the end-users do not need to deploy and manage their own computing services thus enabling fast deployment and minimum operational and management overheads.

While Cloud computing brings promising benefits, it also introduces some challenging security and privacy issues1. These issues include how data owners (i.e. entities which have outsourced their data) could be assured that their data are used in an authorized manner, how the confidentiality of outsourced data be protected while still allowing legitimate accesses of data, or allowing computations being performed on the data, how the trustworthiness of service metering be assured so that end-users are not charged unfairly, etc.

In this project, you will have the opportunity to research for effective solutions to address any one of these challenging security and privacy issues.