Towards a new security approach based on heartbeat authentication to ensure security of cloud data access

Abstract

Cloud computing represents the most recent trends in the world of information technology. It uses the latest virtualization techniques to offer the user several types of SaaS, PaaS or IaaS services. It also introduces new security challenges, especially regarding access control, confidentiality and availability. The concerns about security issues remain the main obstacle to the adoption of the cloud by companies. As a consequence, a lot of researchers have been interested in protecting access to data stored in cloud environments. The aim of this work is, on the one hand, to study the security mechanisms proposed to ensure the security of data, whose two fields of investigation are the management of access to the data of the distant users and the management of the confidentiality of these data in the cloud, and on the other hand, to explore the possibility of adapting the opportunities offered by these mechanisms, so as to put forward our security solution. The security schema we suggest in this paper allows a distant user to access of all their data anywhere in the cloud by means of authentication based on the signature of their heartbeat. The performed experiments demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed approach, which sharply outperforms the other approaches in terms of execution time, robustness, and a set of simulated attacks.