Secured data destruction in cloud based multi-tenant database architecture

Abstract

Cloud computing falls into two general categories. Applications being delivered as service and hardware and data centers that provides those services [1]. Cloud storage evolves from just a storage model to a new service model where data is being managed, maintained, and stored in multiple remote severs for back-up reasons. Cloud platform server clusters are running in network environment and it may contain multiple users' data and the data may be scattered in different virtual data centers. In a multi-user shared cloud computing platform users are only logically isolated, but data of different users may be stored in same physical equipment. These equipments can be rapidly provisioned, implemented, scaled up or down and decommissioned. Current cloud providers do not provide the control or at least the knowledge over the provided resources to their customers. The data in cloud is encrypted during rest, transit and back-up in multi tenant storage. The encryption keys are managed per customer. There are different stages of data life cycle Create, Store, Use, Share, Archive and Destruct. The final stage is overlooked [2], which is the complex stage of data in cloud. Data retention assurance may be easier for the cloud provider to demonstrate while the data destruction is extremely difficult. When the SLA between the customer and the cloud provider ends, today in no way it is assured that the particular customers' data is completely destroyed or destructed from the cloud provider's storage. The proposed method identifies way to track individual customers' data and their encryption keys and provides solution to completely delete the data from the cloud provider's multi-tenant storage architecture. It also ensures deletion of data copies as there are always possibilities of more than one copy of data being maintained for back-up purposes. The data destruction proof shall also be provided to customer making sure that the owner's data is completely removed.