| Summary: | Cloud computing is becoming popular due to its convenience and no initial capital cost to buy the physical resources. Users can conveniently use resources in the cloud such as computing resources or storage resources, in a minimum setup time. Moreover, they only need to pay for only what they use, which is analogous to using electricity. However, the security concerns for the data is high as the cloud technology is relatively new and security holes exist in this new technology.
OpenStack is a cloud computing platform, which is open-source, and supported by big industry players. It is a new platform and growing rapidly due to the strong support from the community. However, it still has security issues such as data security. It does not offer the ability to encrypt the block and object storage at the time this project is proposed. The objective of this project is to strengthen the security of data when storing on public cloud servers compatible with OpenStack such as Amazon EC2 or S3.
In this project, we have designed an encryption architecture for OpenStack using a gateway system between the clients and storage server. We have also implemented a proof-of-concept prototype by modifying OpenStack and its dashboard.
Although our solution address the one of the issues regarding data security, there are other issues in OpenStack that can affect the security of the data, such as using clear text in network API or authentication issues. Further research on the issues to remediate the security holes is recommended to achieve the strong data security in cloud storage and computing.
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