Emerging multi-tenant cloud computing ecosystems allow multiple applications to share virtualised pool of computing and networking resources. As a result such ecosystems are becoming increasingly prone to data privacy concerns (personal data leakages and unauthorised access). While cloud computing providers support robust security and privacy mechanisms (e.g, public key cryptography, firewalls, virtual private networks, among many others), they lack mechanisms and frameworks to monitor, audit and verify these data privacy concerns. The emergence of data protection regulations around the world, such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and the Data Protection Act (DPA) in the UK, further emphasise the need to overcome these privacy limitations. A novel technique for monitoring, auditing and verifying the operations carried out on a user's personal data in cloud computing ecosystems is proposed. Our research methodology leverages distributed ledger technologies (e.g., Blockchain, Smart Contracts) for developing an immutable recording technique, which transparently logs, monitors and verifies the operations carried out on user data. Using a healthcare pharmacy scenario and extensive real-world experiments, we validate the feasibility of the proposed technique. The proposed work handles a large pool of requests (> 13K) ensuring minimal latency (≈50-60 ms) and overheads for three different service packages varied with respect to the number of actors and operations).

The recognition of capabilities supplied by cloud systems is presently growing up. Collecting or sharing healthcare data and sensitive information especially during Covid-19 pandemic has motivated organizations and enterprises to leverage the upsides coming from cloud-based applications. However, the privacy of electronic data in such applications remains a significant challenge for cloud vendors to adapt their solutions with existing privacy legislation standards such as general data protection regulation (GDPR). This paper, first, proposes a formal model and verification for data usage requests of providers in a cloud composite service using a model checking tool. A cloud pharmacy scenario is presented to illustrate the connectivity of providers in the composite service and the stream of their requests for both collection and movement of patient data. A set of verification is, then, undertaken over the pharmacy service in accordance with three significant GDPR obligations, namely user consent, data access and data transfer. Following that, the paper designs and implements a cloud container virtualization based on the verified formal model realising GDPR requirements. The container makes use of some enforcement smart contracts to only proceed the providers’ requests, which are compliant with GDPR. Finally, several experiments are provided to investigate the performance of our approach in terms of time, memory and cost.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) remains an important requirement for many electronic services which utilise user data. GDPR compliance verification for a cloud provider is aimed to confirm that personal data provided by a user is shared in-line with the requirements of this legislation, so that any subsequent audit carried out on the provider does not lead to a financial penalty. This verification involves two aspects: (i) ensuring that user consent has been obtained; (ii) sharing of data with external cloud providers is undertaken in a transparent way, so that the user is aware of which providers the information was shared with and for what purpose. Using a survey we describe why users are still ambivalent about the use of GDPRand how its adoption can be improved using a Blockchain-based architecture that can provide greater transparency on how GDPR compliance is supported by cloud providers.