Secure Distributed Data Storage in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has gained great attention from both industry and academia since 2007.With the goal of providingusersmore flexible services in a transparent manner, all services are allocated in a “cloud” that actually is a collection of devices and resources connected through the Internet. One of the core services provided by cloud computing is data storage. This poses new challenges in creating secure and reliable data storage and access facilities over remote service providers in the cloud. The security of data storage is one of the necessary tasks to be addressed before the blueprint for cloud computing is accepted. In the past decades, data storage has been recognized as one of the main concerns of information technology. The benefits of network-based applications have led to the transition from server-attached storage to distributed storage. Based on the fact that data security is the foundation of information security, a great quantity of efforts has been made in the area of distributed storage security [1 3]. However, this research in cloud computing security is still in its infancy [4]. One consideration is that the unique issues associated with cloud computing security have not been recognized. Some researchers think that cloud computing security will not be much different from existing security practices and that the security aspects can be well-managed using existing techniques such as digital signatures, encryption, firewalls, and/or the isolation of virtual environments, and so on [4]. For example, SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a protocol that provides reliable secure communications on the Internet for things such as Web browsing, e-mail, instant messaging, and other data transfers.