Background

Cloud computing enables ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand access to shared pools computing resources that can reduce capital costs, increase flexibility and enable users to capitalize on economies of scale. However, security threats remain a major risk to adoption. Traditional security protocols that protect cloud communications are not efficient at handling new and fast evolving security issues including authentication, data-in-transit security, man-in-the-middle attacks, sensitive information disclosure, replay, compromised-key, repudiation, and session hijacking attacks.

Technology Overview

Experts at Queen’s University have developed a novel high-performance secure cloud communication architecture to effectively mitigate communication threats between cloud entities, ensure security for data-in-transit and authenticity of cloud users and providers. Moreover, the architecture includes a high-performance cloud-focused security protocol which provides faster reconnection facility for supporting frequent connectivity and dealing with connection trade-offs. This protocol efficiently utilizes the strength and speed of symmetric block encryption, cryptographic hash, public key cryptography and ephemeral key-exchange mechanism. It ensures security for both the data and the cryptographic keys. The result is an efficient, fast and safe communication channel that outperforms traditional security protocols in performance and bandwidth consumption without significant impact on memory usage at the server side.

Benefits

Architecture can efficiently mitigate various attacks on cloud communications including man-in-the-middle (e.g. eavesdropping, sniffing, identity spoofing, data tampering), sensitive information disclosure, re-play, compromised-key, repudiation and session hijacking attacks.
Architecture protects cloud communications with less negotiation and bandwidth overhead, more reasonable memory usage, and faster connectivity than the traditional security protocols (e.g. TLSv1.3).
It is applicable to both TCP and UDP-based communications and has no dependency on the SSL/TLS/DTLS implementations at any part of the communication channel. It can thus be easily integrated with any protocol or server system.

Applications

Cloud communications
Cloud computing

Opportunity

Queen’s University is seeking companies interested in licensing, implementing and/or commercializing this technology.

A Secure Cloud Communication Architecture

Patents

IP Status

Seeking