Key research issues for privacy protection and preservation in cloud computing

Cloud computing promises an open and promising environment where customers or users can utilise and deploy IT services in a pay-as-you-go style while saving huge capital investments on their own IT infrastructure. The openness and virtualisation features in cloud environments make privacy protection and preservation be a challenging issue. Currently, in existing privacy protection and preservation fields, many approaches and methods have been investigated and presented to withstand different kinds of attackers and risks. On the basis of this, many researchers start to consider these in cloud environments. But current work is still at the early stage. Therefore, a systematic investigation and an overall classification of key issues in cloud privacy protection and preservation are necessary to keep current research on the right track while reducing unnecessary work as much as possible. Hence, in this paper, we investigate and classify various privacy issues in cloud environments. Especially, we focus on some key areas of cloud privacy protection and preservation from the perspective of cloud roles and cloud service levels. This paper can help to provide an overall picture of cloud privacy protection and preservation and point out potential key areas in cloud privacy protection and preservation. © 2012 IEEE