Mitigating Disaster using Secure Threshold-Cloud Architecture

Volume 1 - Issue 2

Elochukwu Ukwandu*, William J Buchanan and Gordon Russell

Received: November 14, 2018;   Published: November 26, 2018

DOI: 10.32474/CTCSA.2018.01.000107

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Abstract

There are many risks in moving data into public cloud environments, along with an increasing threat around large-scale data leakage during cloud outages. This work aims to apply secret sharing methods as used in cryptography to create shares of cryptographic key, disperse and recover the key when needed in a multi-cloud environment. It also aims to prove that the combination of secret sharing scheme and multi-clouds can be used to provide a new direction in disaster management by using it to mitigate cloud outages rather than current designs of recovery after the outages. Experiments were performed using ten different cloud services providers at share policies of 2 from 5, 3 from 5, 4 from 5, 4 from 10, 6 from 10 and 8 from 10 for which at different times of cloud outages key recovery were still possible and even faster compared to normal situations. All the same, key recovery was impossible when the number of cloud outages exceeded secret sharing defined threshold. To ameliorate this scenario, we opined a resilient system using the concept of self-organization as proposed by Nojoumian et al in 2012 in improving resource availability but with some modifications to the original concept. The proposed architecture is as presented in our Poster: Improving Resilience in Multi-Cloud Architecture.

Keywords: Secret Shares; Disaster Mitigation; Thresholds Scheme; Cloud Service Providers

Abstract| Introduction| Our Approach| Results and Evaluations| Discussions| Conclusions, Lessons Learnt and Future Work| References|