Cloud Computing: Security, Privacy and Practice

Cloud computing is an emerging computing paradigm in which IT resources and capacities are provided as services over the Internet. It builds on the foundations of distributed computing, grid computing, virtualization, service orientation, etc. Cloud computing offers numerous benefits from both the technology and functionality perspectives such as increased availability, flexibility, and functionality. However, this new paradigm also brings many security and privacy issues such as secure remote storage, outsourcing computation and secure virtualization. All these security and privacy issues should be carefully studied and solved before the wide deployment of cloud computing. We are pleased to present to you ten papers dealing with advanced research and technology on the security in cloud computing. These papers are selected following a rigorous process with the help of reviewers around the globe. They addressed the security and privacy issues in cloud computing and presented solutions for these problems. One of security issues in cloud computing is how to outsource data to potentially untrusted cloud servers. It also usually incurs huge computation overhead. In the paper entitled ‘‘Server-aided Anonymous Attribute-based Authentication in Cloud Computing’’ [1], Liu et al. proposed an efficient and secure outsourcing algorithm of ABS to address the above challenging issue. To protect and share the personal health records stored in cloud, in the paper entitled ‘‘Secure Sharing of Personal Health Records in Cloud Computing: Ciphertext-Policy Attribute Based Signcryption’’ [2], Liu et al. proposed a new approach achieving fine-grained access control of data by using the ciphertext-policy attribute based signcryption (CP-ABSC). Availability of cloud data is another important security requirement in cloud computing. In the paper ‘‘Remote Data Possession Checking with Enhanced Security for Cloud Storage’’ [3], Yu et al. presented an improved scheme to fix the security flaws of the original protocol which is vulnerable to replay attack and deletion attack launched by a dishonest server. To guarantee that users’ files are available and stored in some specified cloud servers, a novel challenge-and-response technique was presented in the paper ‘‘Towards Secure and Reliable Cloud Storage against Data Re-outsourcing’’ [4] by Jiang et al. Cloud data sharing is another important research topic in cloud computing. The paper entitled ‘‘A Secure and Efficient Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Proxy Re-Encryption for Cloud Data Sharing’’ [5] by Liang et al. proposed a new ciphertextpolicy attribute based proxy re-encryption (CP-ABPRE) to tackle the problem by integrating the dual system encryption technology with selective proof technique. Zhuang et al. proposed an information theoretical secure verifiable secret sharing (VSS)