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There are lot of research works carried out in the field of Information Technology (IT), which have more impact on the education throughout the world. The main contribution from IT in today's education world is e-learning. There are several institutions implemented the mechanism and several technologies of e-learning in different countries. E-learning provides more flexibility in education.Although there are several organizations and institutions had come up with the e-learning system, the cost of investment involved for the infrastructure setup is much higher for e-learning applications. Cloud Computing is one of the important technology, which provides different services, which plays a vital role in the education domain and e-learning mechanism. In addition, the security factor in sharing the content is also much important nowadays as the content is shared among different countries with multiple source environments. In this paper, cloud-based e-learning is implemented using access control mechanism, which prevents the cloud resources from illegal user access. The key management schemes combined with access control technique is discussed for secure content sharing and to protect the e-learning environment. The traditional e-learning mechanism is compared with the cloud e-learning for the better understanding of the cloud usage and advantages. Findings indicate that cloud-based e-learning utilizes cloud services in a secure way and also more flexible and scalable in accessing the e-learning content. KEYWORDScloud computing, e-learning, key management, secured access control INTRODUCTIONNowadays, many educational institutions encourage the development of cloud e-learning system, which provides access to learning resources at anytime. The e-learning system, which provides more benefits 1 for the e-learners, has been implemented in several universities in different countries. One of the issues identified in implementing the e-learning mechanism is the cost factor 2 for the initial setup. The infrastructure needed for e-learning process implementation is the major problem for several institutions as the budget needed is more to support and update the e-learning system. The other major difficulties in e-learning implementation are obtaining or locating the servers, storage along with the network 3 needed to support, and also the resources mainly the humans needed to maintain and update e-learning system. E-learning process involves internet technology and its similar to the tradition teaching or education methodology. 1 The main process involved in e-learning is the client-server mechanism and also the web-based concepts. 4Accessibility and Storage are the other major problems in e-learning. Other works 4-6 solved the previous issues faced in e-learning by using the concept of web services and focussed on selection and combination process of learning objects. 7 Cloud computing 8 is the new paradigm in the IT world, which can also help the education sector. Cloud computing and its services can be utilized through the i...

In cloud environment, the importance of security for the outsourced data has increased much, since the data is maintained and controlled by the semi-trusted third-party cloud providers. Data Security is one of the major factors to be considered in group data sharing. Using the secret key, the entire file is encrypted directly in a conventional security framework; however, in a cloud-based environment for group mechanism, this framework cannot be applied as there is a problem of key distribution. This research paper proposes an efficient hierarchical-based group key mechanism for a cloud-based environment. This proposed system relies on Key Distribution Server (KDS), which performs cryptographic key operations for securing the data in the cloud. Also, this system uses logical key hierarchy (LKH) protocol to maintain hierarchical tree for scalability. The group key is generated using the group member secret values and a secret value assigned by the KDS server. Performance analysis of this system shows that the proposed key management system is more efficient and much suitable for cloud environment. KEYWORDScloud computing, forward and backward secrecy, group key management, logical key hierarchy INTRODUCTIONIn cloud computing, the resources are shared through the internet and the outsourced data needs more security and privacy. To provide the data storage and computation services, many cloud providers have emerged, such as Google App Engine, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and so on. One of the main services provided by cloud is pay-as-you-go 1 for the usage. In addition, the cloud providers initially provide with the limited storage space for users to store their data. By using cloud computing, users can able to access and retrieve the data any time and any where using these cloud services.There are several case studies related to the data storage in cloud. 2 There are several reasons for organization to prefer cloud servers for storing their company data.(1) Instead of buying the storage server, organizations depend on cloud provider for storing their data as it reduces financial cost and overload; (2) when the data is stored in cloud, data owners can share their data to other users easily. Moreover, many personal data are also stored in cloud by the individuals using Drop box, etc. 3,4 Even though cloud provides us with several advantages, there is lot of security challenges that needs to be considered when storing and sharing data using cloud. In this proposed scheme, we consider two major security issues particularly.First, only authorized persons should have access to the data and it is achieved through efficient key management mechanism. Second, by applying cryptographic operations, it guarantees secure data sharing among group members and also to provide security whenever there is a upload or download services from cloud. The basic approach followed earlier is to use the cryptographic mechanisms of encryption and decryption to store and retrieve data in and out of cloud storage. This basic approa...