Introducing a hybrid infrastructure and information-centric approach for secure cloud computing

Security has been considered as the key concern of adopting cloud computing. This could be ascribed to the customers’ lack of control over their confidential data once in the cloud and to the absence of trust in cloud providers. Unfortunately, the research efforts in the area of cloud security have not yet succeeded to give the required ”peace of mind” to cloud customers. Therefore, in an attempt to figure out the main loopholes in cloud security, this paper questions the fundamental principles of the security approaches in the cloud. The paper highlights two main drawbacks; the first is due to a potential incompatibility among security measures, while the other is due to the focus on securing the infrastructure rather than the data itself. Therefore, the paper advocates the need for integrating information-centric security approaches, and hence presents a novel security framework that adopts both infrastructure and information-centric security services.