Information Flow Control to Secure Data in the Cloud

Data security remains a major concern for organizations considering the use of cloud services to store their confidential, business-critical data. In this paper, we investigate how information flow control can be used in the cloud to enhance the confidence of enterprises, so they can safely and securely adopt cloud solutions for their data storage needs. We discuss how different techniques can be used with the CloudMonitor tool to guarantee the protection of data in the cloud. We then give an overview of how centralized and decentralized information flow control systems operate, and the comparative advantages and disadvantages of each approach. Our analysis suggests that CloudMonitor can achieve better data security with the use of decentralized information flow control. We then discuss different decentralized information flow tracking tools applied to monitoring data in the cloud. CloudMonitor enables the consumers and the providers of cloud services to agree on acceptable security policies as well as their implementation, to ensure secure data storage in the cloud.