Secure Data Storage Architecture on Cloud Environments

Securing sensitive customer data outsourced to external servers in cloud computing environments is challenging. To maintain data confidentiality on untrusted servers, conventional data security techniques usually employ cryptographic approaches. However, most enterprises are unwilling to employ these approaches if they require high-performance client devices to cipher the entire data. In this situation, separating out the confidential data is beneficial since only the confidential data are encrypted or stored in trusted servers. Although this idea has already been proposed, its support is still insufficient. This paper proposes a secure data storage model in cloud computing environments that is based on the concept of data slicing and presents its prototype tool that supports the low-cost migration of existing applications. Our tool provides a structured query language (SQL) translation mechanism that provides transparent access to partitioned data without changing the original SQL queries. A simple case study shows how the proposed architecture implements secure data storage in cloud computing environments.