An extensive research survey on data integrity and deduplication towards privacy in cloud storage

Owing to the highly distributed nature of the cloud storage system, it is one of the challenging tasks to incorporate a higher degree of security towards the vulnerable data. Apart from various security concerns, data privacy is still one of the unsolved problems in this regards. The prime reason is that existing approaches of data privacy doesn't offer data integrity and secure data deduplication process at the same time, which is highly essential to ensure a higher degree of resistance against all form of dynamic threats over cloud and internet systems. Therefore, data integrity, as well as data deduplication is such associated phenomena which influence data privacy. Therefore, this manuscript discusses the explicit research contribution toward data integrity, data privacy, and data deduplication. The manuscript also contributes towards highlighting the potential open research issues followed by a discussion of the possible future direction of work towards addressing the existing problems

Security Limitations with Cloud Computing: Well-defined Security Measures Using Cloud Computing

Due to the ever-growing threat of security breaches that information technology (IT) organizations continually face, protecting customer information stored in the cloud is critical to ensure data integrity. Research shows that new categories of data breaches frequently emerge; thus, security strategies that build trust in consumers and improve system performance are crucial. The purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore and analyze the strategies used by database administrators (DBAs) to secure data in a private infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud environment. The participants comprised of six DBAs from two IT companies in Baltimore, Maryland, with experience and knowledge of security strategies to secure data in private IaaS clouds. The disruptive innovation theory was the foundational framework for this study. Data were collected using semistructured interviews and a review of seven organizational documents. A thematic analysis was used to analyze the data. Two key themes are addressed in this article: importance of well-defined security measures in cloud computing and limitations of existing security controls in cloud computing. The findings of well-defined security strategies may benefit DBAs and IT organizations by providing strategies that may prevent future data breaches. Well-defined security strategies may protect an individual’s data which, in turn, may promote individual well-being and build strong communities. Keywords: cloud computing, security strategies, data breaches DOI: 10.7176/JIEA/11-2-05 Publication date: June 30th 202

A State-Based Proactive Approach To Network Isolation Verification In Clouds

The multi-tenancy nature of public clouds usually leads to cloud tenants' concerns over network isolation around their virtual resources. Verifying network isolation in clouds faces unique challenges. The sheer size of virtual infrastructures paired with the self-serviced nature of clouds means the verification will likely have a high complexity and yet its results may become obsolete in seconds. Moreover, the _ne-grained and distributed network access control (e.g., per-VM security group rules) typical to virtual cloud infrastructures means the verification must examine not only the events but also the current state of the infrastructures. In this thesis, we propose VMGuard, a state-based proactive approach for efficiently verifying large-scale virtual infrastructures against network isolation policies. Informally, our key idea is to proactively trigger the verification based on predicted events and their simulated impact upon the current state, such that we can have the best of both worlds, i.e., the efficiency of a proactive approach and the effectiveness of state-based verification. We implement and evaluate VMGuard based on OpenStack, and our experiments with both real and synthetic data demonstrate the performance and efficiency

Security Strategies to Prevent Data Breaches in Infrastructure as a Service Cloud Computing

Due to the ever-growing threat of security breaches that information technology (IT) organizations continually face, protecting customer information stored within the cloud is critical to ensuring data integrity. Research shows that new categories of data breaches constantly emerge; thus, security strategies that build trust in consumers and improve system performance are a must. The purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore and analyze the strategies used by database administrators (DBAs) to secure data in a private infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud computing. The participants comprised of 6 DBAs from 2 IT companies in Baltimore, Maryland, with experience and knowledge of security strategies to secure data in private IaaS cloud computing. The disruptive innovation theory was the conceptual framework for this study. Data were collected using semistructured interviews and a review of 7 organizational documents. A thematic analysis was used to analyze the data. Four key themes emerged: importance of well-defined security measures in cloud computing, measures to address security controls in cloud computing, limitations of existing security controls in cloud computing, and future and potential security measures solutions in cloud computing. The findings may benefit DBAs and IT organizations by providing strategies to prevent future data breaches. Well-defined security strategies may protect an individual’s data, which in turn may promote individual well-being and build strong communities

Cloud-Based Software Engineering : Proceedings of the Seminar No. 58312107

The seminar on cloud-based software engineering in 2013 covered many interesting topics related to cloud computing and software engineering. These proceedings focus on decision support for moving to the cloud, on opportunities that cloud computing provides to software engineering, and on security aspects that are associated to cloud computing. Moving to the Cloud – Options, Criteria, and Decision Making: Cloud computing can enable or facilitate software engineering activities through the use of computational, storage and other resources over the network. Organizations and individuals interested in cloud computing must balance the potential benefits and risks which are associated with cloud computing. It might not always be worthwhile to transfer existing services and content to external or internal, public or private clouds for a number of reasons. Standardized information and metrics from the cloud service providers may help to make the decision which provider to choose. Care should be taken when making the decision as switching from one service provider to another can be burdensome due to the incompatibilities between the providers. Hardware in data centers is not infallible: the equipment that powers cloud computing services is as prone to failure as any computing equipment put to high stress which can have an effect on the availability of services. Software Engineering – New Opportunities with the Cloud: Public and private clouds can be platforms for the services produced by parties but the cloud computing resources and services can be helpful during software development as well. Tasks like testing or compiling - which might take a long time to complete on a single, local, workstation - can be shifted to run on network resources for improved efficiency. Collaborative tools that take advantage of some of the features of cloud computing can also potentially boost communication in software development projects spread across the globe. Security in the Cloud – Overview and Recommendations: In an environment where the resources can be shared with other parties and controlled by a third party, security is one matter that needs to be addressed. Without encryption, the data stored in third-party-owned network storage is vulnerable and thus secure mechanisms are needed to keep the data safe. The student seminar was held during the 2013 spring semester, from January 16th to May 24th, at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Helsinki. There were a total of 16 papers in the seminar of which 11 were selected for the proceedings based on the suitability to the three themes. In some cases, papers were excluded in order to be published elsewhere. A full list of all the seminar papers can be found from the appendix. We wish you to have an interesting and enjoyable reading experience with the proceedings

Security Auditing and Multi-Tenancy Threat Evaluation in Public Cloud Infrastructures

Cloud service providers typically adopt the multi-tenancy model to optimize resources usage and achieve the promised cost-effectiveness. However, multi-tenancy in the cloud is a double-edged sword. While it enables cost-effective resource sharing, it increases security risks for the hosted applications. Indeed, multiplexing virtual resources belonging to different tenants on the same physical substrate may lead to critical security concerns such as cross-tenant data leakage and denial of service. Therefore, there is an increased necessity and a pressing need to foster transparency and accountability in multi-tenant clouds. In this regard, auditing security compliance of the cloud provider’s infrastructure against standards, regulations and customers’ policies on one side, and evaluating the multi-tenancy threat on the other side, take on an increasing importance to boost the trust between the cloud stakeholders. However, auditing virtual infrastructures is challenging due to the dynamic and layered nature of the cloud. Particularly, inconsistencies in network isolation mechanisms across the cloud stack layers (e.g., the infrastructure management layer and the implementation layer), may lead to virtual network isolation breaches that might be undetectable at a single layer. Additionally, evaluating multi-tenancy threats in the cloud requires systematic ways and effective metrics, which are largely missing in the literature. This thesis work addresses the aforementioned challenges and limitations and articulates around two main topics, namely, security compliance auditing and multi-tenancy threat evaluation in the cloud. Our objective in the first topic is to propose an automated framework that allows auditing the cloud infrastructure from the structural point of view, while focusing on virtualization-related security properties and consistency between multiple control layers. To this end, we devise a multi-layered model related to each cloud stack layer’s view in order to capture the semantics of the audited data and its relation to consistent isolation requirements. Furthermore, we integrate our auditing system into OpenStack, and present our experimental results on assessing several properties related to virtual network isolation and consistency. Our results show that our approach can be successfully used to detect virtual network isolation breaches for large OpenStack-based data centers in a reasonable time. The objective of the second topic is to derive security metrics for evaluating the multi-tenancy threats in public clouds. To this end, we propose security metrics to quantify the proximity between tenants’ virtual resources inside the cloud. Those metrics are defined based on the configuration and deployment of a cloud, such that a cloud provider may apply them to evaluate and mitigate co-residency threats. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our metrics and show their usefulness, we conduct case studies based on both real and synthetic cloud data. We further perform extensive simulations using CloudSim and wellknown VM placement policies. The results show that our metrics effectively capture the impact of potential attacks, and the abnormal degrees of co-residency between a victim and potential attackers, which paves the way for the design of effective mitigation solutions against co-residency attacks