Securing Cryptographic Keys in the Cloud: A Survey

Public cloud users are increasingly interested in securing their data and network traffic by using outsourced encryption or decryption services (cryptography as a service). However, many concerns have been raised about trusting the outsourced service's memory with sensitive information like the user's cryptographic keys. This survey reviews techniques for securing data owners' cryptographic keys in a public cloud, preserving them from any inquisitive actions on the part of cotenants (fellow data owners, domain administrators, or other third parties) and the cloud provider itself. The aim is to provide readers with a comparative in-depth analysis of available techniques and point to open research problems.