THE CLOUD COMPUTING KEY MANAGEMENT

Key management is a huge, complex issue now in the land of cloud computing. Encryption is generally used technique for implementing key management. Now a days encryption is universally recognized method to protect data .        

Management of cloud computing along with the key management is a very complex issue. In public cloud particularly in IaaS, it is a complex task to implement because it has most of the pitfalls. If we think about the key management then the biggest point that needs to be consider is not that how encryption is implemented but the main issue is the requirement of the ownership of the key. Also one other point to be noted is that where to keep the encryption key either in cloud infrastructure or in customer premise.           

 Security is  one of the main problems in cloud computing structure. Cloud service providers perform task for monitor the cloud  and data usage. In this Users end is not responsible for maintaining back end data storage and its exact storage location. The security of this user end data can be ensured by implementing key management.   

  Various key management interoperability protocols are  used to ensure the effectiveness of the key management. Enabling encryption on the virtual machine is challenging task because it is not possible to encrypt everything. Use of virtual machine  increases the amount of the data, its working is not same as the physical machine. Cloud customer is only responsible for maintaining key  management. Key provisioning and storage is not maintained by them. Virtual machines generally stores key. 

There are various stages for key management i.e. generating keys, using keys, storing keys,distributing keys  revoking keys ,verifying keys   and destroying keys, some of the assumption are two basic scenarios.  Major issue that comes in key management is key generation and key application, security of the keys and master key, failure recovery, key expiration and key uses, there is poor integration between key management systems and application of the encryption and data Lifecycle.