Systematic identification of threats in the cloud: A survey

Abstract

When a vulnerability is discovered in a system, some key questions often asked by the security analyst are what threat(s) does it pose, what attacks may exploit it, and which parts of the system it affects. Answers to those questions provide the necessary information for the security assessment and to implement effective countermeasures. In the cloud, this problem is more challenging due to the dynamic characteristics, such as elasticity, virtualization, and migration -changing the attack surface over time. This survey explores threats to the cloud by investigating the linkages between threats, attacks and vulnerabilities, and propose a method to identify threats systematically in the cloud using the threat classifications. First, we trace vulnerabilities to threats by relating vulnerabilities-to-attacks, and then relating attacks-to-threats. We have established the traceability through an extensive literature review and synthesis that resulted in a classification of attacks in the cloud, where we use the Microsoft STRIDE threat modeling approach as a guide for relating attacks to threats. Our approach is the genesis towards a concrete method for systematically identifying potential threats to assets provisioned and managed through the cloud. We demonstrate the approach through its application using a cloud deployment case study scenario.

Comparative Analysis of Threat Modeling Methods for Cloud Computing towards Healthcare Security Practice

“…Though the above questions have not been addressed by existing studies, there have instead been varying opinions regarding effective threat modelling methods for cloud computing [6], [14], [26]- [29]. Additionally, threat modeling methods are being used in their isolated ways in threat modeling healthcare systems.…”

“…Institutions which require temporal resources such as storage, processing and development platforms can also leverage on the capabilities of cloud computing. In addition to the lower costs, the tenants of the cloud service companies could benefit from scalability, business continuity, collaboration efficiency, flexibility and strategic values [5], [6]. Based on perceived demand for cloud-based systems, IBM and Active Health Management developed "Collaborative Care Solution" which was implemented in 2010 to support medical staff in accessing healthcare data from different sources [1].…”

IP Spoofing In and Out of the Public Cloud: From Policy to Practice

“…Some of these works, including [8][9][10][11][12][13], have offered comprehensive looks at a wide range of security and privacy issues pertaining to network, storage, infrastructure, and software aspects of the public Cloud. Other works have focused on more narrow topics and problems, including the problem of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks [14][15][16] and IP spoofing [17][18][19][20] in the public Cloud. Unfortunately, two commonly observed limitations of the existing studies on DDoS and IP spoofing in the public Cloud are (1) They are mostly theoretical works based on hypothetical assumptions.…”

CloudSafe: A Tool for an Automated Security Analysis for Cloud Computing

“…Cloud computing provides many beneficial factors over the traditional networks, which enhance the productivity and performance of enterprises and individuals [1], [2]. But at the same time, it faces many security challenges and threats, affecting the decisions of using the cloud computing services significantly [3]. That is, potential cloud users need to consider various security implications before migrating their data and operations to the cloud computing environment [4].…”