More Privacy for Cloud Users: Privacy-Preserving Resource Usage in the Cloud

Contrary to many other approaches to security and privacy in the cloud, we are interested in the problem of hiding behavioral information of users consuming their cloud resources, e.g. CPU time or storage space, from the cloud provider. More precisely, we are looking for solutions that allow users to purchase a contingent of resources from a cloud provider and to anonymously consume their resources till their limit is reached (in case of storage they can also reclaim these resources back anonymously). We present a definition of such anonymous yet authorized and bounded cloud resource schemes along with an instantiation based on Camenisch-Lysyanskaya signatures. Then, we extend the scheme to another scheme providing even more privacy for users (by even hiding the issued resource bound during interactions and thus providing full anonymity to users) and provide some useful extensions for both schemes. We also underpin the practical efficiency of our schemes by means of experimental results obtained from an implementation.