Providing a data location assurance service for cloud storage environments
In the cloud storage environment, the geographic location of the data has profound impacts on its privacy and security; it is due to the fact that the data stored on the cloud will be subject to the laws and regulations of the country where it is physically stored. This is one of the main reasons why companies that deal with sensitive data (e.g., health related data) cannot adopt cloud storage solutions. In order to ensure the rapid growth of cloud computing, we need a data location assurance solution which not only works for existing cloud storage environments but also influences those companies to adopt cloud storage solutions. In this paper, we present a Data Location Assurance Service (DLAS) solution for the well-known, honest-but-curious server model of the cloud storage environment; the proposed DLAS solution facilitates cloud users not only to give preferences regarding their data location but also to receive verifiable assurance about their data location from the Cloud Storage Provider (CSP). This paper also includes a detailed security and performance analysis of the proposed DLAS solution. Unlike other solutions, the DLAS solution allows a user to give a negative location preference regarding his/her data and works for CSPs (e.g., Windows Azure) that practice geo-replication of data (to ensure availability of data in case of natural disasters). Our proposed DLAS solution is based on cryptographic primitives such as zero knowledge sets protocol and ciphertext-policy attribute based encryption. According to the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose a nongeolocation based solution of this kind.