A Quantitative Analysis of Current Security Concerns and Solutions for Cloud Computing

Abstract

The development of cloud computing services is speeding up the rate in which the organizations outsource their computational services or sell their idle computational resources. Even though migrating to the cloud remains a tempting trend from a financial perspective, there are several other aspects that must be taken into account by companies before they decide to do so. One of the most important aspect refers to security: while some cloud computing security issues are inherited from the solutions adopted to create such services, many new security questions that are particular to these solutions also arise, including those related to how the services are organized and which kind of service/data can be placed in the cloud. Aiming to give a better understanding of this complex scenario, in this article we identify and classify the main security concerns and solutions in cloud computing, and propose a taxonomy of security in cloud computing, giving an overview of the current status of security in this emerging technology.

Access Control As a Service in Cloud: Challenges, Impact and Strategies

“…These advance-level security challenges can be categorized into five main classes, including safety standards, network, access control, cloud infrastructure and data categories. The safety class deals with standard bodies and authorities where the lack of safety standards, compliance risks, lack of auditing [37], lack of legal aspects (SLA) and lack of trust between CSPs and cloud consumers are the focused challenging issues [46,34]. The network category issues are considered to be the most challenging since cloud computing is more prone to network-related attacks compared to the traditional computing paradigms [105].…”

Analysis of SDN Contributions for Cloud Computing Security

“…There is no more dependence in VLAN tags to differentiate traffic flows, for instance SDN main control-data protocol is OpenFlow, which requires a flow table in data plane switches. Flow rules poorly designed or incorrectly set priorities is an additional concern to multi-tenancy in clouds Table I HOW SDN CHARACTERISTICS SOLVES OR WORSENS THE MAIN CLOUD SECURITY ISSUES categorizations, such as [25]. Paper [26] mentions VM-level attacks, abuse and malicious use of cloud computing (due to easy registration and incomplete identification of users), loss of governance (SLAs with gaps in security parameters), lock-in (when a user is unable to migrate from one service provider to another), isolation failure, data loss or leakage, management interface compromise, compliance risk, malicious insiders, insecure interfaces and APIs, and account or service hijacking.…”

“…In [4] as well as in [25], network related issues represent 14% of stated total. In [26], network related issues are not shown explicitly under a network class, but from our analysis, 18% are related to networking, being the other issues, in general, related to access policies, computing infrastructure, and data.…”

“…In Table I, the first cloud network and infrastructure issue, regards the possible lack of proper installations of network firewalls, which could facilitate for hackers to access the cloud interface on behalf of legitimate users [25]. In [23], the authors propose a firewall application that runs over an OpenFlowbased SDN controller.…”

Towards Secure Instance Migration in the Cloud

“…Nelson et al [13] have shown many security issues in different parts of cloud computing in their study. The security issues they mentioned by other researchers are in the category of network and data security, interface, virtualization, governance, compliance and legal issues which have been discussed below.…”