Security And Privacy Analyzed Cloud Framework Design And Implementation For Ethiopian Universities

Abstract

In now days educational institutions throughout the world and in Ethiopia are highly depending on IT to deliver different services that enhance the teaching-learning process, researching as well as the different business requirements. Cloud computing is a promising sector in the IT industry to support HEIs because of its performance, accessibility, low cost and many other essential characteristics. Also, the cloud computing approach can maximize the capacity of these institutions without investing on new infrastructure or buying licensed and expensive software. Even though a wide range of luxuries are provided by cloud computing there are still several issues that act as obstacle to use cloud computing in the HEIs. Privacy and security of users?�? data is the major issue in cloud computing. The objective of this paper is to find a solution that can enhance some technical requirements with relate to user?�?s data security and privacy in the cloud. The research paper discusses the proposed solution which is based on the DCS approach. This approach allows the data owner to fully control the data security from within the data itself and throughout the data life cycle on the cloud. To achieve this a symmetric encryption algorithm, that is AES-256 encryption algorithm is used to encrypt each user?�?s data and then using the CRT combined with the RSA 1024bit encryption algorithm the access control policies and secure key sharing are enforced to the data. And here the privacy is enhanced since the number of authorized users is first defined and the key sharing or the CRT solution is calculated based on these users and the process is even hidden from the cloud provider. Finally, the integrity proof is computed by using SHA 256-bit hashing algorithm and attached to the data. All these security parameters are set and managed by the data owner and a secure self-protective and self- descriptive file created and this file can be out sourced and shared on the cloud environment to be accessed by only authorized users based on the attached security policies. The research findings are evaluated in terms of addressing the research questions, meeting the objective of the research and in terms of the computation and storage overhead caused during the implementation. The prototype implementation and the evaluation result show the proposed solution is simple and can be used practically.