A Comprehensive Analysis of Key Management Models in the Cloud: Design, Challenges, and Future Directions

Cloud computing from the last few years has grown from a promising business concept to one of the fastest growing segments of IT Enterprise. Because of the attractive features offered by cloud computing, many enterprises are using cloud storage for storing essential information. Like any other emerging technologies cloud computing also brings many new security challenges. Thus, numerous researches were done to ameliorate this problem by introducing effective key management solutions to secure the data stored in the cloud. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on the various key management techniques that can be adopted to provide effective security to the cloud-stored data. The primary focus of this survey is to highlight the issues and challenges involved in designing an effective key management solution for the cloud. We have also done a detailed analysis of thematic taxonomy on key derivation hierarchies.