Practical techniques building on encryption for protecting and managing data in the Cloud

Companies as well as individual users are adopting cloud solutions at an over-increasing rate for storing data and making them accessible to others. While migrating data to the cloud brings undeniable benefits in terms of data availability, scalability, and reliability, data protection is still one of the biggest concerns faced by data owners. Guaranteeing data protection means ensuring confidentiality and integrity of data and computations over them, and ensuring data availability to legitimate users. In this chapter, we survey some approaches for protecting data in the cloud that apply basic cryptographic techniques, possibly complementing them with additional controls, to the aim of producing efficient and effective solutions that can be used in practice.