A Review of Security Issues in Cloud Computing

Abstract: Cloud computing has proven to be a technology that has changed the way people work and
access and utilize its resources. It has acquired features of both centralized client server architecture as well as distributed systems. On the one hand it gives virtual centralization of resources just like client server architecture; it acquires all the benefits of distributed systems at service providers side by distribution of resources. With the opportunities it is bringing to the users, some challenges are also mixed too, which must also be addressed. In cloud systems user has no knowledge of where the data is actually stored and so leaves the user with no idea what can be the possible threats to data. He has to completely depend on the service provider for its security and integrity. In this paper we take a brief overview of the solutions that have been proposed to work upon the security issues faced by cloud systems. Keywords: cloud computing, third party publication, accounting, data security, access control I. Introduction: Before we go into details of security risks and its proposed solutions, first lets discuss its advantages. Whats in the cloud that has made it so popular? Firstly, user doesnt have to invest in buying resources like storage servers or costly softwares to establish his business. He simply can use existing infrastructure and resources provided by a third party to start with. This saves money and helps to build an on-demand business where you pay only for what you need. Cloud provides the application services in the form of three archetypal models or their combinations. These service models provide services at different levels i.e. software as a service (SaaS), Platform as a service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) etc.
Cloud computing provides several benefits to the enterprises. One such is the cost cutting. The enterprise need not own the resources required for the business. Other benefits are easy management and global scalability. Though there are several benefits over the traditional computing, the cloud computing adoption is slower than expected. In recent survey of more than 500 chief executives and IT managers in 17 countries, it was found that despite the potential benefits, executives trusted the existing internal systems over cloud based systems due to fear about security threats, loss of control of data and systems outages occurring in the cloud systems. The cloud infrastructure can support any computing model compatible with loosely coupled CPU clusters. Organizations can provide hardware for clouds internally (internal clouds), or a third party can provide it externally (hosted clouds). A cloud might be restricted to a single organization or group ( private clouds), available to the general public over the Internet (public clouds), or shared by multiple groups or organizations (hybrid clouds). Two tiered cloud computing stack is shown in figure 2. The cloud computing stack consists of three basic modules: i. Software as a Service module(SaaS) ii. Platform as a Service (PaaS) module iii. Infrastructure as a Service module (IaaS).

IaaS includes the entire infrastructure resource stack from the facilities to the hardware platforms that reside in them. It incorporates the capability to abstract resources (or not), as well

as deliver physical and logical connectivity to those resources. Ultimately, IaaS provides a set of APIs which allow management and other forms of interaction with the infrastructure by consumers. PaaS sits atop IaaS and adds an additional layer of integration with application development frameworks; middleware capabilities; and functions such as database, messaging, and queuing; which allow developers to build applications upon to the platform; and whose programming languages and tools are supported by the stack. SaaS in turn is built upon the underlying IaaS and PaaS stacks; and provides a self-contained operating environment used to deliver the entire user experience including the content, its presentation, the application(s), and management capabilities.[5] Generally, SaaS provides the most integrated functionality built directly into the offering, with the least consumer extensibility, and a relatively high level of integrated security (at least the provider bears a responsibility for security). PaaS is intended to enable developers to build their own applications on top of the platform. As a result it tends to be more extensible than SaaS, at the expense of customer ready features. This tradeoff extends to security features and capabilities, where the built in capabilities are less complete, but there is more flexibility to layer on additional security. IaaS provides few if any application-like features, but enormous extensibility. This generally means less integrated security capabilities and functionality beyond protecting the infrastructure itself. This model requires that operating systems, applications, and content be managed and secured by the cloud consumer.

Multi-tenancy is another feature unique to clouds, especially in public clouds. Essentially, it allows cloud providers to manage resource utilization more efficiently by partitioning a virtualized, shared infrastructure among various customers. From a customers perspective, the notion of using a shared infrastructure could be a huge concern. However, the level of resource sharing and available protection mechanisms can make a big difference. For example, to isolate multiple tenants data, Salesforce.com employs a query rewriter at the database level, whereas Amazon uses hypervisors at the hardware level. Providers must account for issues such as access policies, application deployment, and data access and protection to provide a secure, multi-tenant environment.[6]

Cloud systems suffer from three major security threats: data security, access control and crash and backup. In cloud system user is not aware of the location of data. But all its data whether personal or business related are all there. So it is of big concern that data that data is stored securely, and service provider storing the data must guarantee its security. For this purpose service level agreement are shared between user and the service provider. But it not always solves the problem. Access control is required because in cloud storage multi tenancy is one of the features in which data of more than one user is stored at same server. So it is required that no two users having data at same server can access each others data. Finally, in any system failures can occur any time and can lead to loss of data which may be of critical use. So backup of data and recovery of lost data are required. These issues and work done to acknowledge these issues are discussed in detail in later sections. Security: The figure below illustrates these issues: in SaaS environments the security controls and their scope are negotiated into the contracts for service; service levels, privacy, and compliance are all issues to be dealt with legally in contracts. In an IaaS offering, while the responsibility for securing the underlying infrastructure and abstraction layers belongs to the provider, the remainder of the stack is the consumers responsibility. PaaS offers a balance somewhere in between, where securing the platform itself falls onto the provider, but securing the applications developed against the platform and developing them securely, both belong to the consumer. [5]

Cloud provides internet based services to support business process and rental platforms or software to its users. As the resources are accumulated at a single place and handled and published by a third party i.e. the service provider site it may pose security risk to the data stored there because it is storage resource is being shared by multiple users. For this purpose, [2] has proposed an identity information protection method which . Also data in the cloud are published by the user to a third party on the cloud. In this case user has to trust the third party to ensure secure publishing of his documents.

Issues to Clarify Before Adopting Cloud Computing[10]

Gartner, Inc., the world's leading information technology research and advisory company, has identified seven security concerns that an enterprise cloud computing user should address with cloud computing providers (Edwards, 2009) before adopting: User Access. Ask providers for specific information on the hiring and oversight of privileged administrators and the controls over their access to information. Major companies should demand and enforce their own hiring criteria for personnel that will operate their cloud computing environments. Regulatory Compliance. Make sure your provider is willing to submit to external audits and security certifications. Data location. Enterprises should require that the cloud computing provider store and process data in specific jurisdictions and should obey the privacy rules of those jurisdictions. Data Segregation. Find out what is done to segregate your data, and ask for proof that encryption schemes are deployed and are effective. Disaster Recovery Verification. Know what will happen if disaster strikes by asking whether your provider will be able to completely restore your data and service, and find out how long it will take. Disaster Recovery. Ask the provider for a contractual commitment to support specific types of investigations, such as the research involved in the discovery phase of a lawsuit, and verify that the provider has successfully supported such activities in the past. Without evidence, don't assume that it can do so. Long-term Viability. Ask prospective providers how you would get your data back if they were to fail or be acquired, and find out if the data would be in a format that you could easily import into a replacement application. Data Security:

1. Authentication and Identity Management: By using cloud services, users can easily access their
personal information and make it available to various services across the Internet. An identity management (IDM) mechanism can help authenticate users and services based on credentials and characteristics.6 A key issue concerning IDM in clouds is interoperability drawbacks that could result from using different identity tokens and identity negotiation protocols. Existing password-based authentication has an inherited limitation and poses significant risks. An IDM system should be able to protect private and sensitive information related to users and processes. How multi-tenant cloud environments can affect the privacy of identity information isnt yet well understood. In addition, the multi-jurisdiction issue can complicate protection measures.3 While users interact with a front-end service, this service might need to ensure that their identity is protected from other services with which it interacts. 6,7 In multi-tenant cloud environments, providers must segregate customer identity and authentication information. Authentication and IDM components should also be easily integrated with other security components[6]. Access Control and Accounting: Heterogeneity and diversity of services, as well as the domains diverse access requirements in cloud computing environments, demand fine-grained access control policies. In particular, access control services should be flexible enough to capture dynamic, context, or attribute- or credential-based access requirements and to enforce the principle of least privilege. Such access control services might need to integrate privacy-protection requirements expressed through complex rules. Its important that the access contro l system employed in clouds is easily managed and its privilege distribution is administered efficiently. We must also ensure that cloud delivery models provide generic access control interfaces for proper interoperability, which demands a policy-neutral access control specification and enforcement framework that can be used to address cross-domain access issues.8 The access control models should also be able to capture relevant aspects of SLAs. The utility model of clouds demands proper accounting of user and service activities that generates privacy issues because customers might not want to let a provider maintain such detailed accounting records other than for billing purposes. The outsourcing and multi-tenancy aspects of clouds could accelerate customers fears about accounting logs. 2. Access Control:Cloud computing providers expose a set of software interfaces or APIs that customers use to manage and interact with cloud services. Provisioning, management, orchestration, and

monitoring are all performed using these interfaces. From authentication and access control to encryption and activity monitoring, these interfaces must be designed to protect against both accidental and malicious attempts to circumvent policy. Furthermore, organizations and third parties often build upon these interfaces to offer value-added services to their customers. This introduces complexity of the new layered API; it also increases risk, as organizations may be required to relinquish their credentials to third parties in order to enable their agency.[8]**** propose a two stage API access control mechanism, using the Role Based Access Control Model (RBAC). This model ensures a two stage security at the API level. The first stage to ensure that only registered users from white listed domains can access the cloud service and at the same time extracts the required input for the second stage. Role Based Access Control Model has been chosen because it is greatly suited for the commercial and enterprise needs. It also becomes easy for the organization to map a users organization role (local role) onto the role with respect to the service to be accessed (global role). The implementation of this model is in progress.
Since the physical location of user data in the cloud is unknown and the data are often distributed across multiple cloud services, a user controllable and privacy preserving access control mechanism is necessary for the success of cloud computing in general and for the protection of user data in specific. [9]*** In this paper, we discuss a novel approach to controlling access to user data in the cloud; the concept is called Permission as a Service (PaaS). Specifically, PaaS separates access control from other services to provide a separate service in the cloud. This allows users to set permissions for all data in a single location. Permission as a service (PaaS) makes

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life in the Cloud easier for content owners using multiple content sharing services by providing a centralized location. This de-coupling would help service providers to understand that the contract between content owner and service provider is not one-sided, which enables more effective communication between service provider and content owner. In this paper we discussed an effective solution for de-coupling access control logic from services that provide content, leveraging attribute based encryption (ABE). Accounting: In this paper, we present a mechanism of leveraging trust between cloud computing

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users and providers, which is based on anonymity of the data owner. The core idea is to cut off the semantic link of the data to their owner while preserving the cloud computing provider with the capability of properlyand reliablycharging for the usage of its cloud services. This way, the cloud computing provider can perform the required operations on an anonymized dataset, then deliver the results and charge for usage without getting to know the identity of the data owner. So, the user may safely use the cloud computing services for his businesses without having to fear a correlation of the cloud service invocation to his own identity. [11] Trust Management and Policy Integration: Although multiple service providers coexist in clouds and collaborate to provide various services, they might have different security approaches and privacy mechanisms, so we must address heterogeneity among their policies. 2,9,10 Cloud service providers might need to compose multiple services to enable bigger application services. Therefore, mechanisms are necessary to ensure that such a dynamic collaboration is handled securely and that security breaches are effectively monitored during the interoperation process. Existing literature has shown that even though individual domain policies are verified, security violations can easily occur during integration. 10 Hence, providers should carefully manage access control policies to ensure that policy integration doesnt lead to any security breaches. In cloud computing environments, the interactions between different service domains driven by service requirements can be dynamic, transient, and intensive. Thus, a trust framework should be developed to allow for efficiently capturing a generic set of parameters required for establishing trust and to manage evolving trust and interaction/sharing requirements.10,11 The clouds policy integration tasks should be able to address challenges such as semantic heterogeneity, secure interoperability, and policy-evolution management. Furthermore, customers behaviors can evolve rapidly, thereby affecting established trust values. This suggests a need for an integrated, trust-based, secure interoperation framework that helps establish, negotiate, and maintain trust to adaptively support policy integration. 10,11 Secure-Service Management: In cloud computing environments, cloud service providers and service integrators compose services for their customers. The service integrator provides a platform that lets independent service providers orchestrate and interwork services and cooperatively provide additional services that meet customers protection requirements. Although many cloud service providers use the Web Services Description Language (WSDL), the traditional WSDL cant fully meet the requirements of cloud computing services description. In clouds, issues such as quality of service, price, and SLAs are critical in service search and composition. These issues must be addressed to describe services and introduce their

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features, find the best interoperable options, integrate them without violating the service owners policies, and ensure that SLAs are satisfied. In essence, an automatic and systematic service Privacy and Data Protection: Privacy is a core issue in all the challenges weve discussed so far, including the need to protect identity information, policy components during integration, and transaction histories. Many organizations arent comfortable storing their data and applications on systems that reside outside of their on-premise datacenters.5 This might be the single greatest fear of cloud clients. By migrating workloads to a shared infrastruc ture, customers private information faces increased risk of potential unauthorized access and exposure. Cloud service providers must assure their customers and provide a high degree of transparency into their operations and privacy assurance. Privacy-protection mechanisms must be embedded in all security solutions. In a related issue, its becoming important to know who created a piece of data, who modified it and how, and so on. Provenance information could be used for various purposes such as traceback, auditing, and history-based access control. Balancing between data provenance and privacy is a significant challenge in clouds where physical perimeters are abandoned. Organizational Security Management: Existing security management and information security lifecycle models significantly change when enterprises adopt cloud computing. In particular, shared governance can become a significant issue if not properly addressed. Despite the potential benefits of using clouds, it might mean less coordination among different communities of interest within client organizations. Dependence on external entities can also raise fears about timely responses to security incidents and implementing systematic business continuity and disaster recovery plans. Similarly, risk and cost-benefit issues will need to involve external parties. Customers consequently need to consider newer risks introduced by a perimeter-less environment, such as data leakage within multi-tenant clouds and resiliency issues such as their providers economic instability and local disasters. Simi larly, the possibility of an insider threat is significantly extended when outsourcing data and processes to clouds. Within multi-tenant environments, one tenant could be a highly targeted attack victim, which could significantly affect the other tenants. Existing life-cycle models, risk analysis and management processes, penetration testing, and service attestation must be reevaluated to ensure that clients can enjoy the potential benefits of clouds. The information security area has faced significant problems in establishing appropriate security metrics for consistent and realistic measurements that help risk assessment. We must reevaluate best practices and develop

References: *1+ David Chappell, A short introduction to cloud platforms, August 2008, Sponsored by Microsoft Corporation, COPYRIGHT 2008 CHAPPELL & ASSOCIATES.

[2] Ranchal, R.; Bhargava, B.; Othmane, L.B.; Lilien, L.; Anya Kim; Myong Kang; Linderman, M.; ,
"Protection of Identity Information in Cloud Computing without Trusted Third Party," Reliable Distributed Systems, 2010 29th IEEE Symposium on , vol., no., pp.368-372, Oct. 31 2010-Nov. 3 2010 [3] Pascal Urien; Estelle Marie; Christophe Kiennert; , An Innovative Solution for Cloud Computing Authentication Grids of EAP-TLS Smart Cards, Digital Telecommunications (ICDT), 2010 Fifth International Conference on , vol., no., pp.22-27, 13-19 June 2010 [4] On Cloud Computing Deployment Architecture, Madhukara Phatak#1, Kamalesh.V.N* [5] Security Guidance For Critical Areas of Focus In Cloud Computing V2.1 Prepared by the Cloud Security Alliance December 2009 [6] Security and Privacy Challenges in Cloud Computing Environments, Hassan Takabi and James B.D. Joshi University of Pittsburgh Gail-Joon Ahn Arizona State University [7] Understanding Cloud Computing Vulnerabilities, Bernd Grobauer, Tobias Walloschek, and Elmar Stcker Siemens [8] Sirisha, A.; Kumari, G.G.; , API access control in cloud using the Role Based Access Control Model, Trendz in Information Sciences & Computing (TISC), 2010 , vol., no., pp.135-137, 17-19 Dec. 2010 [9] Echeverr a,

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