ABSTRACT

Cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services, Anything as a Service (AaaS), over the web on demand basis. It uses web and central remote servers to maintain data and applications. Outsourcing data storage and maintenance to third-party cloud services reduces data management costs, but providing security guarantees is a major issue. In this approach, a secured cloud storage system that achieves policy-based access control and file assured deletion is proposed with an information accountability cloud framework to keep track of the actual usage of the clients’ data. Automated logging and distributed auditing of relevant access performed by any entity is handled. The access policy generated for the file controls the file accesses and policy revocation makes the file permanently inaccessible. The system is built upon a set of cryptographic key operations that are self-maintained by a set of key managers and adds security features.