Leveraging Towards Access Control, Identity Management, and Data Integrity Verification Mechanisms in Blockchain-Assisted Cloud Environments: A Comparative Study.

Today, IT organizations largely rely on cloud computing services to meet their infrastructure needs, making it the backbone of the industry. However, several challenges remain that need to be effectively addressed. Data breaches, identity and access management problems, unsafe interfaces and APIs, data loss, shared technology vulnerabilities, compliance and legal issues, inadequate data encryption, lack of visibility and control, delayed security patching, and the requirement to have faith in the cloud service provider's security procedures are the primary security challenges in cloud computing. Blockchain technology has emerged as a promising technology to address many of these security issues. In this paper, an extensive study is carried out to analyze the security issues in the cloud and the categorization of gathered security issues in terms of security requirements, such as confidentiality, integrity, availability, authenticity, and privacy. Research questions are framed to dig deeper into the different blockchain-enabled solutions present to resolve cloud security issues, such as access control, identity management (IDM), and data integrity verification, along with their analysis. In-detail comparative analysis of the above blockchain-assisted solutions is also presented along with the future research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]