Detection and Intelligent Control of Cloud Data Location Using Hyperledger Framework

Cloud Computing and its security issues have always drawn technical attention. Specifically, the compliance issues associated with the location of cloud data have always been a concern of a Cloud Service Consumer (CSC). On the other hand, blockchain based smart contracts have become very popular nowadays for automatizing legal transactions. They eliminate the need of mediators to verify a process and secure the same using digital signatures. Moreover, the in-built immutable nature of the blockchain makes it to compromise its security. A "Hyperledger Fabric" (Androulaki et al., 2018) based blockchain framework is used in this work to solve the locational constraints of cloud based services and guarantee a compliant geographical transfer of the cloud data when required. Our contribution towards configuring the hyperledger network and designing the chaincodes guarantee an organization wise segregation of the location information and prevent illegitimate users from accessing the same. Add-on security measures including port segregation, TLS (Transport Layer Security) certificates and access control rules are implemented to secure the configuration files, chaincodes and ledgers, respectively. The simulation results reflect a scalable system as denoted by the performance graphs. Security effectiveness value is calculated based on the NIST threat model.