Communications of the ACM
Cloud Security Awaits Encryption Breakthroughs
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The wider use of public clouds depends on further developments in encryption technology, said participants during a recent panel at the Brookings Institution.
Companies often cooperate on developing standards, but they would need to limit the amount of information that is shared and leaked if they co-existed as competitors within a public cloud infrastructure.
Microsoft's Dan Reed notes that claims-based identity management has become a common and popular approach for strengthening identity and access rights. Claims-based identity management would provide users with access to data for a certain purpose, for a bounded period of time, and limit the ability to transfer data to any other party.
Developments such as public key cryptography and key management would refine data access rights in multitenant cloud computing systems. Fully homomorphic encryption, or the ability to perform calculations while data is encrypted so only the owner of the data controls access, is one of the hottest topics. Cloud-based encryption technologies are still not ready to be deployed, and Reed says more investment research in this area is needed.
From Government Computer News
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