Data Anonymization and Integrity Checking in Cloud Computing

Data storage in cloud has become a recent topic of interest in technology. An increasing number of clients store their important data in remote cloud servers, without even leaving a copy in their local computers. Sometimes, the clients must ensure that their data is not lost or corrupted. A lot of works have been done on designing remote data integrity checking protocols to ensure the correctness of stored data. But all these methods check the integrity of encrypted text or plain text. An important issue that arises after encryption is the difficulty in performing computations on encrypted data. Instead of encryption, anonymization of data can be done as a means of preserving privacy. Data anonymization is the process of changing data that will be used or published in a way that prevents the identification of key information. Anonymized data can be stored in a cloud and processed without concern that other individuals may capture the data. Intel performed data anonymization in cloud where anonymization takes place on the VMs sending the data and de anaonymization within a secure enclave. But, anonymization at the clients may take more of their computational power which is not feasible, especially for thin clients. A better efficient data anonymization scheme is proposed where anonymization and deanonymization is performed by the secure enclave so that computational power at the client is saved. Also, a scheme to check the integrity of anonymized data in cloud has been explored.