A Technical Overview on the Usage of Cloud Encryption Services

摘要

As the number of successful attacks to ICT infrastructures raises, encryption plays a relevant role in maintaining data security and privacy, thus protecting confidential information. The existence of a large amount of unencrypted data, for instance, multiple files stored in smart cities control centers, support the urgency to minimize the dangers of this situation effectively. With the advance and integration of systems within smart cities, several critical files are available to multiple services and apps. For example, pictures, citizen's documents, city services information. Several of these files contain personal and/or critical information and are stored unencrypted, mainly depending on access control systems to maintain their security. With the growing number of services available in smart cities aiming to increase the information available to citizens, this problem should be quickly addressed. In this context, this paper proposes the adoption of widely available cloud services to maintain encrypted data. It is described how to set up encryption in the download and upload of files implementing Azure, Google Cloud, or Amazon Web Services platforms, plausibly and straightforwardly. The discussion includes the processes to generate, maintain and use encryption keys within groups of user/services and also how the storage service automatically encrypts and decrypt the data. The paper presents a comparative discussion about the selected platforms, including also actual price comparisons. From the experimental work, the results show that, among the platforms tested on our experimental scenario, Amazon was the most natural platform to integrate the encryption with other services.