Cyber-Storms Come from Clouds: Security of Cloud Computing in the IoT Era

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly changing our society to a world where every "thing" is connected to the Internet, making computing pervasive like never before. This tsunami of connectivity and data collection relies more and more on the Cloud, where data analytics and intelligence actually reside. Cloud computing has indeed revolutionized the way computational resources and services can be used and accessed, implementing the concept of utility computing whose advantages are undeniable for every business. However, despite the benefits in terms of flexibility, economic savings, and support of new services, its widespread adoption is hindered by the security issues arising with its usage. From a security perspective, the technological revolution introduced by IoT and Cloud computing can represent a disaster, as each object might become inherently remotely hackable and, as a consequence, controllable by malicious actors. While the literature mostly focuses on security of IoT and Cloud computing as separate entities, in this article we provide an up-to-date and well-structured survey of the security issues of Cloud computing in the IoT era. We give a clear picture of where security issues occur and what their potential impact is. As a result, we claim that it is not enough to secure IoT devices, as cyber-storms come from Clouds.

A Systematic Survey of Industrial Internet of Things Security: Requirements and Fog Computing Opportunities

“…Also, we are aware that a comprehensive and thorough discussion on how Fog computing could tackle the IIoT security requirements would require a dedicated treatment that would result in an entire paper itself, which is out of the scope of this work (for instance, in [255] we focus on how Cloud requirements can impact IoT). Thus, the aim of this section is to provide food for thought on the topic and a source of inspiration for future research, rather than an exhaustive analysis.…”

Toward Intelligent Cyber-Physical Systems: Digital Twin Meets Artificial Intelligence

“…By exploiting Edge and Fog computing, the Digital Twin can offload time-sensitive processing from the physical object, which in turn contributes towards further optimizations of the hardware costs. Additionally, new algorithms for efficient data filtering, envisioning privacy and security improvements [9], can be applied and the data can be restricted within a trusted private infrastructure. Finally, due to the close proximity, Edge-based Digital Twins can use the available radio network information to adapt the physical objects operations or to optimize resource allocation in order to improve the Quality of Experience (QoE).…”

A Review of Machine Learning Algorithms for Cloud Computing Security

“…Figure 2 illustrates the design of CC that includes a start-to-finish reference design that represents the layers of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Model. CC is a complicated design with multiple zones of vulnerability [37]. The components of CC are as follows:…”