Enhancing Security in Cloud Using Trusted Monitoring Framework

Cloud computing is a technology that provides network based services on demand. Cloud computing technology provides advantages to end users and business organizations. Few notable advantages are cost efficiency, increased storage capacity, backup and recovery, continuous resource availability and location independence. Data owners host their private data in the cloud and worry about unauthorized access of their data. They feel uncomfortable about any user misusing their private data. This insecure feeling of data owners holds them back from using cloud services. Any unauthorized users accessing the owner's private data leads to accountability issues. We design a trusted monitoring framework, which provides a chain of trust that excludes the untrusted privileged domain, as well as utilizing the trusted computing technology to ensure the integrity of the monitoring environment. To solve the accountability issue, a mechanism to monitor the actual data usage is proposed. This approach grants access rights to users based on their role and also monitors every access to the owner's data, verifying that the service level agreements have been violated or not.