Confidentiality of Data in the Cloud
Nathalie Baracaldo, Joseph Glider · 2019
Cloud computing has emerged as very beneficial for businesses that are looking to reduce their costs, deploy new applications rapidly or that do not want to maintain their own computational infrastructure. A combination of mistrust for the cloud storage provider and the necessity to comply with numerous industry-specific standards and regulations impose strict confidentiality requirements for cloud storage providers. In this chapter, we highlight the confidentiality challenges caused by outsourcing data storage to the cloud as well as some strategies to mitigate them. Because data reduction techniques, such as compression and deduplication, are a key component of cloud storage systems to reduce operational costs but are not effective for encrypted data, we also present in detail the challenges that arise due to the use of these techniques and present a set of mechanisms that can be used to protect tenants’ confidentiality while enabling data reduction techniques.