PrivacyAware Cloud Ecosystems and GDPR Compliance Understanding how cloud providers support the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) remains an imporant challenge for new providers emerging on the market. GDPR influences access to, storage, processing and tranmission of data, requiring these operations to be exposed to a user to seek explicit consent. A privacyaware cloud architecture is proposed that improves transparency and enables the audit trail of providers who accessed the user data to be recorded. The architecture not only supports GDPR compliance by imposing several data protection requirements on cloud providers, but also benefits from a blockchain network that securely stores the providersu0027 operations on the user data. A blockchainbased tracking approach based on a shared privacy agreement implemented as a smart contract is described  providers who violate GDPR rules are automatically reported through a voting mechanism.

Vallum: Privacy, Confidentiality and Access Controlfor Sensitive Data in Cloud Environments Managing sensitive data in shared environments such as public clouds is an enduring challenge. While several approaches exist to protect data at rest such as endtoend encryption, there exist only a few solutions such as homomorphic encryption that offer secure data processing. Unfortunately, these solutions cannot be used in practice as they incur nonnegligible runtime overheads and security risks. Moreover, as the majority of data management systems were designed to operate in private cloud environments, which are under the control of the data owner, they often lack appropriate mechanisms for access control as well as privacy assurance. In this paper we propose Vallum, a data access and protection layer that closes these gaps while enabling users to operate data management systems in shared environments such securely as public clouds. Vallum utilizes Intel SGX and remote attestation to ensure confidentiality and integrity of the data being stored and processed. Furthermore, it provides access protection and privacy assurance through a extensible architecture. Our performance evaluation indicates that the overhead introduced by Vallum makes it viable to be deployed in cloud infrastructures.