Advances in the usage of information and communication technologies (ICT) has given rise to the popularity and success of cloud computing. Cloud computing offers advantages and opportunities for business users to migrate and leverage the scalability of the pay-as-you-go price model. However, outsourcing information and business applications to the cloud or a third party raises security and privacy concerns, which have become critical in adopting cloud implementation and services. Researchers and affected organisations have proposed different security approaches in the literature to tackle the present security flaws. The literature also provides an extensive review of security and privacy issues in cloud computing. Unfortunately, the works provided in the literature lack the flexibility in mitigating multiple threats without conflicting with cloud security objectives. The literature has further focused on only highlighting security and privacy issues without providing adequate technical approaches to mitigate such security and privacy threats. Conversely, studies that offer technical solutions to security threats have failed to explain how such security threats exist. This paper aims to introduce security and privacy issues that demand an adaptive solution approach without conflicting with existing or future cloud security. This paper reviews different works in the literature, taking into account its adaptiveness in mitigating against future reoccurring threats and showing how cloud security conflicts have invalidated their proposed models. The article further presents the security threats surrounding cloud computing from a user perspective using the STRIDE approach. Additionally, it provides an analysis of different inefficient solutions in the literature and offers recommendations in terms of implementing a secure, adaptive cloud environment.

Cloud Computing is a dreamed vision of utility computing; users can now remotely store private information. However, this has also granted no physical possession of data outsourced to the cloud. Issues of data integrity and cloud accountability arise due to a lack of control. It is desirable to have a scheme that assures data owners of the correctness of information stored in the cloud without introducing huge computational or communication costs. Most existing schemes in the literature have achieved positive results in this regard. Most of the schemes either use blockchain technology which comes with its high energy consumption or assuming the trustworthiness of a third-party auditor. In this paper, we propose a Provable Data Possession scheme that is resistant to malicious auditors, resistant to key resilient exposure, and able to eliminate the issue of procrastinating auditors. The proposed protocol provides efficient auditing through a decentralized third-party to assure data owners of the integrity of data outsourced to the cloud. The main aim is to assure data owners of the integrity of data outsourced to the cloud without the need for a trusted or semi-honest entity. To show that our approach is completely privacy preserving, we instantiated three steps in the protocol: data initialization, verification, and sampling. The security analysis of the proposed approach proves to be secure, with a reduced computational and communicational cost.

An inevitable factor that makes the concept of electronic voting irresistible is the fact that it offers the possibility of exceeding the manual voting process in terms of convenience, widespread participation, and consideration for People Living with Disabilities. The underlying voting technology and ballot design can determine the credibility of election results, influence how voters felt about their ability to exercise their right to vote, and their willingness to accept the legitimacy of electoral results. However, the adoption of e-voting systems has unveiled a new set of problems such as security threats, trust, and reliability of voting systems and the electoral process itself. This paper presents a critical literature review on concepts, architectures, and existing authentication strategies in voice recognition systems for the e-voting system for the disabled electorate. Consequently, in this paper, an intelligent yet secure scheme for electronic voting systems specifically for people living with disabilities is presented.