Securing the Cloud with Homomorphic Encryption
A major concern of cloud users is the potential for losing data privacy once the data has moved to the cloud.
Customers need assurance that their data is well protected by cloud service providers.
Encryption can alleviate this fear, but it also has drawbacks.
To avoid time-consuming downloading and uploading of data for customers, the cloud provider can perform operations in the cloud.
However, to manipulate encrypted data in the cloud, users must share their encryption/decryption keys with the cloud provider, effectively allowing them access to the data.
One of the top threats to cloud computing is malicious insiders.
An insider can be a rogue administrator employed by a cloud service provider, an employee of the victim organization who exploits vulnerabilities to gain unauthorized access, or an attacker who uses cloud resources to launch attacks.
The multitenant nature of the cloud computing environment makes it difficult to detect and prevent insider attacks.
Homomorphic encryption allows computations to be carried out on encrypted data (also known as ciphertext), thus generating an encrypted result, which, when decrypted, matches the result of the same operations performed on the original data (plaintext). This can be a major advantage for applications that outsource encrypted data to the cloud.