The cloud needs cross-layer data handling annotations

Abstract

Nowadays, an ever-increasing number of service providers takes advantage of the cloud computing paradigm in order to efficiently offer services to private users, businesses, and governments. However, while cloud computing allows to transparently scale back-end functionality such as computing and storage, the implied distributed sharing of resources has severe implications when sensitive or otherwise privacy-relevant data is concerned. These privacy implications primarily stem from the in-transparency of the involved back-end providers of a cloud-based service and their dedicated data handling processes. Likewise, back-end providers cannot determine the sensitivity of data that is stored or processed in the cloud. Hence, they have no means to obey the underlying privacy regulations and contracts automatically. As the cloud computing paradigm further evolves towards federated cloud environments, the envisioned integration of different cloud platforms adds yet another layer to the existing in-transparencies. In this paper, we discuss initial ideas on how to overcome these existing and dawning data handling in-transparencies and the accompanying privacy concerns. To this end, we propose to annotate data with sensitivity information as it leaves the control boundaries of the data owner and travels through to the cloud environment. This allows to signal privacy properties across the layers of the cloud computing architecture and enables the different stakeholders to react accordingly. © 2013 IEEE.