Accountability of Data usage in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a distributed model which provides shared pool of resources and services to the customers. Cloud computing can easily provide services through network and these are on demand services to the users. User stores different kinds of data on the cloud which can be sensitive or private and should not be disclose to unauthorized users. That is why the data owner needs to know that who is accessing his data without his required permission and whether his data is handled according to the service level agreement which is made at the time when user registers for the services in cloud. For that data owner should know the current usage of his data in cloud through accountability. In this paper, we are focusing on accountability of outsourced data in cloud. Accountability is verification of authentication and authorization policies. It consists of automated logging and auditing of the data usage. In automated logging, any access to the owners data will trigger authentication and log is generated automatically. These logs generated are sent to the data owner so that he can audit his data usage by analyzing the log records. After analyzing the log records, if data owner finds any unauthorized access to the outsourced data then he will convey this to the cloud service provider in form of audit file. Cloud service provider will read the audit file and take the decisions according to the type of access made to the outsourced data.