Background

Data confidentiality and security of data are the key obstacles to organisations that are
considering migrating their data to Cloud storage networks. Currently data owners have to trust the Cloud provider not to disclose or misuse their data. This exposes their data to software errors, insider threat attacks, accidental leaks, and targeted data theft.

To solve this, we have invented a technology called CloudTomo that enables cloud service
providers with both Software as a Service (SaaS) products and cloud based storage solutions to offer their customers the ability to encrypt and store their data on cloud-based networks and specify the operations that the cloud can perform on the user’s data. Although the cloud service provider is able to carry out computations on behalf of the customer, it is not able to access or modify any of the data or the results of the computations. The cloud service provider is unable to take its own actions to read, copy, decrypt, disseminate or modify the customer’s data at any time.

Confidentiality in Cloud computing is important for all users and the implementation of CloudTomo helps customers for whom confidentiality is a high priority. All enterprises including central and local government, defence, healthcare providers, banks and insurance companies and industry have a need to reduce costs while maintaining their data in a secure and accessible fashion.

Any Cloud computing storage providers or SaaS providers will benefit by licensing CloudTomo technology to protect their customer’s data. The technology could protect data on services provided from Google, Amazon, Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft, etc.. The technology can protect all types of data including web-based email, and any documents stored online.

How does CloudTomo work?

CloudTomo technology automatically encrypts user data as it leaves the browser, so that
the cloud service provider only stores encrypted data. To allow the cloud service provider to perform necessary operations on the data, the cloud is able to decrypt the data, but only in a special virtual machine that runs only software known to satisfy the customer’s security access policy. This permits the cloud to perform arbitrary computations that have been specified by the customer. But the cloud is not able to perform computations on its own behalf, nor to disseminate the customer’s data beyond the special virtual machine environment. CloudTomo has been developed to achieve these restrictions, using commodity hardware and provide a secure, flexible, automatic and efficient solution to the problem of utilising encrypted data stored in the cloud.