Mitigating Disaster using Secure Threshold-Cloud Architecture

Ukwandu, Elochukwu; Buchanan, William J; Russell, Gordon

Abstract

There are many risks in moving data into public cloud environments, along with an increasing threat around large-scale data leakage during cloud outages. This work aims to apply secret sharing methods as used in cryptography to create shares of cryptographic key, disperse and recover the key when needed in a multi-cloud environment. It also aims to prove that the combination of secret sharing scheme and multi-clouds can be used to provide a new direction in disaster management by using it to mitigate cloud outages rather than current designs of recovery after the outages. Experiments were performed using ten different cloud services providers at share policies of 2 from 5, 3 from 5, 4 from 5, 4 from 10, 6 from 10 and 8 from 10 for which at different times of cloud outages key recovery were still possible and even faster compared to normal situations. All the same, key recovery was impossible when the number of cloud outages exceeded secret sharing defined threshold. To ameliorate this scenario, we opined a resilient system using the concept of self-organisation as proposed by Nojoumian et al in 2012 in improving resource availability but with some modifications to the original concept. The proposed architecture is as presented in our Poster: Improving Resilience in Multi-Cloud Architecture.

Citation

Ukwandu, E., Buchanan, W. J., & Russell, G. (2018, November). Mitigating Disaster using Secure Threshold-Cloud Architecture

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Start Date: Nov 24, 2018
• Acceptance Date: Nov 14, 2018
• Online Publication Date: Nov 26, 2018
• Publication Date: Nov 26, 2018
• Deposit Date: Dec 17, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 17, 2018
• Journal: Current Trends In Computer Sciences & Applications
• Publisher: Lupine Publishers
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 1
• Issue: 2
• Keywords: secret shares; disaster mitigation; thresholds scheme; cloud service providers
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/1446236
• Related Public URLs: https://www.lupinepublishers.com/computer-science-journal/abstracts/mitigating-disaster-using-secure-threshold-cloud-architecture.ID.000107.php
• Contract Date: Dec 17, 2018