Classification of File Data Based on Confidentiality in Cloud Computing using K-NN Classifier

Cloud computing is a new paradigm model that offers different services to its customers. The increasing number of users for cloud services i.e. software, platform or infrastructure is one of the major reasons for security threats for customers' data. Some major security issues are highlighted in data storage service in the literature. Data of thousands of users are stored on a single centralized place where the possibility of data threat is high. There are many techniques discussed in the literature to keep data secure in the cloud, such as data encryption, private cloud and multiple clouds concepts. Data encryption is used to encrypt the data or change the format of the data into the unreadable format that unauthorized users could not understand even if they succeed to get access of the data. Data encryption is very expensive technique, it takes time to encrypt and decrypt the data. Deciding the security approach for data security without understanding the security needs of the data is a technically not a valid approach. It is a basic requirement that one should understand the security level of data before applying data encryption security approach. To discover the data security level of the data, the authors used machine learning approach in the cloud. In this paper, a data classification approach is proposed for the cloud and is implemented in a virtual machine named as Master Virtual Machine (Vmm). Other Vms are the slave virtual machines which will receive from Vmm the classified information for further processing in cloud. In this study the authors used three (3) virtual machines, one master Vmm and two slaves Vms. The master Vmm is responsible for finding the classes of the data based on its confidentiality level. The data is classified into two classes, confidential (sensitive) and non-confidential (non-sensitive/public) data using K-NN algorithm. After classification phase, the security phase (encryption phase) shall encrypt only the confidential (sensitive) data. The confidentiality based data classification is using K-NN in cloud virtual environment as the method to encrypt efficiently the only confidential data. The proposed approach is efficient and memory space friendly and these are the major findings of this work.