Cloud Security : A Review of Recent Threats and Solution Models

The most significant barrier to the wide adoption of cloud services has been attributed to perceived cloud insecurity (Smitha, Anna and Dan, 2012). In an attempt to review this subject, this paper will explore some of the major security threats to the cloud and the security models employed in tackling them. Access control violations, message integrity violations, data leakages, inability to guarantee complete data deletion, code injection, malwares and lack of expertise in cloud technology rank the major threats. The European Union invested €3m in City University London to research into the certification of Cloud security services. This and more recent developments are significant in addressing increasing public concerns regarding the confidentiality, integrity and privacy of data held in cloud environments. Some of the current cloud security models adopted in addressing cloud security threats were – Encryption of all data at storage and during transmission. The Cisco IronPort S-Series web security appliance was among security solutions to solve cloud access control issues. 2-factor Authentication with RSA SecurID and close monitoring appeared to be the most popular solutions to authentication and access control issues in the cloud. Database Active Monitoring, File Active Monitoring, URL Filters and Data Loss Prevention were solutions for detecting and preventing unauthorised data migration into and within clouds. There is yet no guarantee for a complete deletion of data by cloud providers on client requests however; FADE may be a solution (Yang et al., 2012)

Notes on Cloud computing principles

This letter provides a review of fundamental distributed systems and economic Cloud computing principles. These principles are frequently deployed in their respective fields, but their inter-dependencies are often neglected. Given that Cloud Computing first and foremost is a new business model, a new model to sell computational resources, the understanding of these concepts is facilitated by treating them in unison. Here, we review some of the most important concepts and how they relate to each other

Security challenges of small cell as a service in virtualized mobile edge computing environments

Research on next-generation 5G wireless networks is currently attracting a lot of attention in both academia and industry. While 5G development and standardization activities are still at their early stage, it is widely acknowledged that 5G systems are going to extensively rely on dense small cell deployments, which would exploit infrastructure and network functions virtualization (NFV), and push the network intelligence towards network edges by embracing the concept of mobile edge computing (MEC). As security will be a fundamental enabling factor of small cell as a service (SCaaS) in 5G networks, we present the most prominent threats and vulnerabilities against a broad range of targets. As far as the related work is concerned, to the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to investigate security challenges at the intersection of SCaaS, NFV, and MEC. It is also the first paper that proposes a set of criteria to facilitate a clear and effective taxonomy of security challenges of main elements of 5G networks. Our analysis can serve as a staring point towards the development of appropriate 5G security solutions. These will have crucial effect on legal and regulatory frameworks as well as on decisions of businesses, governments, and end-users

Multi-tenancy in cloud computing

As Cloud Computing becomes the trend of information technology computational model, the Cloud security is becoming a major issue in adopting the Cloud where security is considered one of the most critical concerns for the large customers of Cloud (i.e. governments and enterprises). Such valid concern is mainly driven by the Multi-Tenancy situation which refers to resource sharing in Cloud Computing and its associated risks where confidentiality and/or integrity could be violated. As a result, security concerns may harness the advancement of Cloud Computing in the market. So, in order to propose effective security solutions and strategies a good knowledge of the current Cloud implementations and practices, especially the public Clouds, must be understood by professionals. Such understanding is needed in order to recognize attack vectors and attack surfaces. In this paper we will propose an attack model based on a threat model designed to take advantage of Multi-Tenancy situation only. Before that, a clear understanding of Multi-Tenancy, its origin and its benefits will be demonstrated. Also, a novel way on how to approach Multi-Tenancy will be illustrated. Finally, we will try to sense any suspicious behavior that may indicate to a possible attack where we will try to recognize the proposed attack model empirically from Google trace logs. Google trace logs are a 29-day worth of data released by Google. The data set was utilized in reliability and power consumption studies, but not been utilized in any security study to the extent of our knowledge