Data confidentiality using fragmentation in cloud computing

Purpose – The aim of this research is to secure the sensitive outsourced data with minimum encryption within the cloud provider. Unfaithful solutions for providing privacy and security along with performance issues by encryption usage of outsourced data are the main motivation points of this research.Design/methodology/approach – This paper presents a method for secure and confidential storage of data in the cloud environment based on fragmentation. The method supports minimal encryption to minimize the computations overhead due to encryption. The proposed method uses normalization of relational databases, tables are categorized based on user requirements relating to performance, availability and serviceability, and exported to XML as fragments. After defining the fragments and assigning the appropriate confidentiality levels, the lowest number of Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) is used required to store all fragments that must remain unlinkable in separate locations.Findings – Particularly in the cloud da...