Available Technologies

Executive Summary

Cloud computing provides end-users on demand access to a shared pool of computing resources, such as computational power and storage. It enables the end-users to utilize those resources in a pay-per-use manner instead of purchasing expensive equipment and maintaining an IT staff. The end-users outsource their computational tasks to the cloud servers where the tasks are processed and then solutions are returned to the end-users. Security has become one of the major concerns that prevent computation outsourcing from being widely adopted. There is a need for more secure and privacy-preserving outsourcing mechanisms that can also provide end-users the ability to validate the received results.

Description of Technology

Michigan State University has developed technology that allows an end-user to secure or mask their data before cloud outsourcing. Cost-Aware Secure Outsourcing uses affine mapping based schemes for the problem transformation and outsourcing so that the cloud is unable to learn any key information from the transformed problem.  Meanwhile, the overhead for the transformation is limited to an acceptable level (cost/secure trade off defined by end-user) compared to the computational savings introduced by the outsourcing itself.

Key Benefits

• Secure computational outsourcing
• Results verification
• Variable computational cost and security

Applications

• Securing cloud computing analysis of
• Financial data
• Medical or patient data
• Engineering equations and data
• Other sensitive information

Patent Status:

Patent pending

Licensing Rights Available

Full licensing rights available

Inventors: Jian Ren, Kai Zhou

Tech ID: TEC2015-0092