Cloud Security

— The cloud is no longer in future, it’s here today. The cloud has fundamentally changed the landscape of computing. Governments are facing critical challenge of improving resource utilization, increase service responsiveness, distributed storage of data, availability of resources at lower cost. In order to fulfil this huge challenge, Governments are fast adopting the new paradigm of computing: Cloud Computing. Governments are moving into Cloud as its adoption presents numerous costs, agility, and operational advantages. In early days of cloud, much of the debate focused on the different merits of Public & Private cloud and the best scenarios, in which a particular model should be adopted. Now there’s a growing realization that Hybrid Cloud is the best model for the government. The paper describes characteristics of each cloud computing deployment models and describes the best scenarios in which a particular model should be adopted based on certain parameters. However, the best scen...

Cloud computing is an emerging IT service paradigm. Instead of developing their own IT departments, business sectors purchase on-demand IT service from external providers in a per-use basis. From business cost perspective, companies are shifting capital expenses (CapExp) on hardware equipments to operational expenses (OpExp). Many companies, especially those startups, found this cloud IT service is economically beneficial. However, this IT service paradigm still requires to overcome some security concerns before it can be fully deployed. One of the main security issues is how to protect client’s data privacy from cloud employees. This paper proposes a PASS scheme for this purpose using Authentication and Secret Sharing.

The rapid development of Internet due to increasing data rates through both broadband cable networks and 4G wireless mobile, make everyone easily connected to the internet. Storages as Services (StaaS) is more popular and many users want to store their data in one place so that whenever they need they can easily access anywhere, any place and anytime in the cloud. The use of the service makes it vulnerable to use by someone to commit a crime or can do Denial of Service (DoS) on cloud storage services. The criminals can use the cloud storage services to store, upload and download illegal file or document to the cloud storage. In this study, we try to implement a private cloud storage using Seafile on Raspberry Pi and perform simulations in Local Area Network and Wi-Fi environment to analyze forensically to discover or open a criminal act can be traced and proved forensically. Also, we can identify, collect and analyze the artifact of server and client, such as a registry of the deskt...

Cloud Computing reshapes the entire computing paradigm. In general, cloud computing means outsourcing available services and data storage in centralized scenario. In cloud computing task allocation is a major problem because multiple numbers of tasks are allocated to multiple numbers of processors for simultaneous processing. From the given list, tasks are queued according to the ascending order based on their duration. This paper is designed to solve the Task Scheduling problem, by using our proposed effective new approach of Backfilling algorithm. Depending upon the task duration, tasks are split into multiple threads for processing. Multiple thread tasks are processed in the basic concept of " gang scheduling " technique. Here we implement new backfilling algorithm concept to minimize the idle processing time of the processors. The existing Simple Backfilling Algorithm (SBA) is used to minimize the ideal time processing. Whereas comparatively Dynamic Cloud Scheduling using Backfilling Algorithm (DCBA) is designed to reduce the ideal time processing than SBA to carry out the process of both LQueue and SQueue simultaneously. At the outset, DCBA reduces the average waiting time. As mentioned the algorithm which is specified in the previous line that contains three level which represent the working speed of the algorithm. The first and second level of DCBA algorithm is comparatively similar to the performance of SBA algorithm. The maximum better performance was given in a queue size (q=1.5) by DCBA algorithm as compare to SBA algorithm. The existing type (Gang Scheduling) consist of two approaches namely Adaptive First Come First Serve (AFCFS) and Largest Job First Served (LJFS) that focus on non-parallel jobs with deadline. When compare to existing gang scheduling algorithm and SBA algorithm the average waiting time of DCBA has slight improvement in the loader level of the key. As the separation of the queue like LQ and SQ the waiting time and average waiting time is reduced comparatively.

Today the IT environment concentrates on Cloud computing where the usage of cloud based applications poses various security threats. Many possible cloud applications fall victim to a tragedy of the generic approach such that a shared cloud service is becoming unstable and insecure based on the commercial demands by IT and other business organization. Companies should develop proper security guidelines for public and private cloud use and utilize an adequate cloud access model. Based on set of features in the three common cloud services, a set of security capabilities is identified which are needed to exercise those characteristic and the cryptographic dealing they entail. Random Number Generators can be used in cloud hosts especially for virtualized machines. Several purpose of Pseudo Random Number Generator (PRNG) exists in cloud which mainly can be used to authenticate users to the information stored on cloud, salts for the passwords or for statistical sampling. ANSI X9.31 is one standard pseudo random number generator used in many standard cryptographic algorithms like AES, RSA that are managed in securing data access in cloud applications. As ANSI X9.31 seed values are not secure they are directly used for generation. With brute force attack the seed values are exposed. On retrieval of seed values the key can be predicted which leads to insecurity of the information stored on the cloud. The proposed obfuscation technique protects from intruders. The proposed technique takes considerable minimum amount of time when compared with the existing method.

The pioneering decentralized access control scheme for susceptible data storage in clouds that supports unidentified authentication. In the proposed scheme, the clouds verify the authenticity of the server without knowing the user’s uniqueness before storing data. The proposed design focuses on the full cycle access controlling scheme where in the presented system it was omitted. In order to achieve secure access controlling scheme we proposed fine-gained approach at cloud level , it prevents unauthorized access controlling from users or adversaries effectively our authentication and access control scheme is decentra-lized and strong, unlike other access control schemes designed for clouds which are centralized. The communication, computa-tion overheads are similar to centralized approaches. More over our proposed design proves that our system has secure crypto mechanism towards achieving data integrity and security.

In last two decades continues increase of comput-ational power and recent advance in the
web technology cause to provide large amounts of data. That needs large scale data
processing mechanism to handle this volume of data. MapReduce is a programming model
for large scale distributed data processing in an efficient and transparent way. Due to its
excellent fault tolerance features, scalability and the ease of use. Currently, there are several
options for using MapReduce in cloud environments, such as using MapReduce as a service,
setting up one’s own MapReduce cluster on cloud instances, or using specialized cloud
MapReduce runtimes that take advantage of cloud infrastructure services. Cloud computing
has recently emerged as a new paradigm that provide computing infrastructure and large
scale data processing mechanism in the network. The cloud is on demand, scalable and high
availability so implement of MapReduce on the top of cloud services cause faster, scalable
and high available MapReduce framework for large scale data processing. In this paper we
explain how to implement MapReduce in the cloud and also have a comparison between
implementations of MapReduce on AzureCloud, Amazon Cloud and Hadoop at the end.

Cloud computing technology offers the possibility
of inter-organizational medical data sharing at a larger
scale. The different organizations can maintain their own
cloud environment while exchanging healthcare data among
them in a peer-to-peer(P2P) fashion according to some
defined polices. However, there are many security and
privacy challenges that hamper the adoption of cloud computing
solutions in healthcare domain. Besides, due to the
privacy sensitivity of healthcare data, an organization may
not wish to disclose its identity to others when exchanging
data in the network to avoid different attacks by the
intruders. Hence, anonymously authenticated data exchange
is essential between the different peer organizations. In this
paper we propose an anonymous on-the-fly secure data
Sk. Md. M. Rahman () · M. M. Hassan · A. Alamri
Information Systems Department, College of Computer
and Information Sciences(CCIS), Research Chair of Pervasive
and Mobile Computing, King Saud University, Riyadh, KSA
e-mail: mizan@ksu.edu.sa
M. M. Hassan
e-mail: mmhassan@ksu.edu.sa
A. Alamri
e-mail: atif@ksu.edu.sa
M. A. Hossain · A. Alelaiwi
Software Engineering Department, College of Computer
and Information Sciences(CCIS), King Saud University,
Riyadh, KSA
e-mail: mahossain@ksu.edu.sa
A. Alelaiwi
e-mail: aalelaiwi@ksu.edu.sa
Md. M. Masud
Computer Science Department, Taif University, Taif, KSA
e-mail: mmasud@tu.edu.sa
exchange protocol for such environment based on pairingbased
cryptography. Our proposed solution allows cloud
peers to dynamically generate temporary identities that are
used to produce a session key for each session of data
exchange. The proposed protocol is robust against different
attacks, such as target-oriented, man-in-the middle,
masquerade, and message manipulation attacks.

Cloud computing is a growing area of concern in the IT security community because cloud architectures are literally popping up all over. Public clouds are available from Google.com, Amazon.com, Microsoft, Oracle/Sun, Canonical/Eucalyptus and many other vendors. Private cloud technologies, where the cloud software is loaded on local or in-house server hardware, are available from VMware, Eucalyptus, Citrix, Microsoft, and there are thousands of vendors offering cloud solutions of all sorts. A search for private cloud hosting on Google.com produced 581,000 page results.

Strong cloud security begins with the infrastructure. If the cloud system’s infrastructure is insecure, it puts the confidentiality and availability of all information used via that cloud system at risk. The infrastructure constitutes a cloud system’s first line of defense. This can be enforced by patching servers, configuring firewalls, and placing intrusion- detection systems (IDS). Security Pain Points must be identified.

This paper is concerned with discovery of the vulnerabilities in the landscape of clouds, discovery of security solutions, and finding evidence that early-adopters or developers have grown more concerned with security.

With the tremendous growth of sensitive information on cloud, cloud security is getting more important than even before. The cloud data and services reside in massively scalable data centers and can be accessed everywhere. The growth of the cloud users has unfortunately been accompanied with a growth in malicious activity in the cloud. More and more vulnerabilities are discovered, and nearly every day, new security advisories are published. Millions of users are surfing the Cloud for various purposes, therefore they need highly safe and persistent services. The future of cloud, especially in expanding the range of applications, involves a much deeper degree of privacy, and authentication. We propose a simple data protection model where data is encrypted using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) before it is launched in the cloud, thus ensuring data confidentiality and security.

Organizations and individuals have been moving to the cloud computing technology looking for effective and fast computing services. Confidential information is becoming more vulnerable to leak due to outsource computations to third-parties. The issue of data breaches could remove all the benefits organizations might get by moving to the cloud-based services. The main goal of securing information is to provide confidentiality, authenticity, integrity and data privacy. Data encryption is being widely employed to secure data. However, as users need to process data in the cloud, normal encryption schemes are practically inapplicable because they require the transmission of the secret keys to the server side to obtain the original data thus performing the required computation on the plaintext. Fully homomorphic encryption can be considered as an effective process that supports arbitrary computation on the ciphertext without requirement of decryption in the cloud. A genetic algorithm is a search operation based on natural genetic and natural selection. Applying the concept of Genetic Algorithms on cryptosystem provides strong randomness that hardens the attacking process for the ciphertext. In this paper, a method to use Genetic Algorithm to generate keys for the fully homomorphic encryption scheme is described and its effectiveness is examined. Moreover, some simple computations were performed on the encrypted data as well. Results showed that a GA generated key provides more randomness than other conventional methods used to generate public and private keys.

Cloud computing provides IT services to users worldwide, Data centers in Clouds consume large amount of Energy leading to highly effective costs. Therefore green energy computing is solution for decreasing operational costs. This survey presents efficient resource allocation and Scheduling algorithm/Techniques analyzed on different network parameters without compromising network performance and SLA constraints. Results are analyzed on different measures, providing a significant cost saving and improvement in Energy Efficiency.

Cloud computing technology is a relatively new concept of providing scalable and virtualized resources, software and hardware on demand to consumers. It presents a new technology to deliver computing resources as a service. It offers a variety of benefits like services on demand and provisioning and suffers from several weaknesses. In fact, security presents a major obstacle in cloud computing adoption. In this paper, the authors will deal with security problems in cloud computing systems and show how to solve these problems using a quantitative security risk assessment model named Multi-dimensional Mean Failure Cost (M2FC). In fact, they summarize first security issues related to cloud computing environments and then propose a generic framework that analysis and evaluate cloud security problems and then propose appropriate countermeasures to solve these problems.

In this work, we employ a key access control management scheme which effortlessly transitions any organization-like security policy to state of the art cloud level security. Offering a very flexible, secure, and hierarchical key access mechanism for institutions that deal with mission-critical data. The scheme also minimizes concerns about moving critical data to the public cloud and ensures only the users with sufficient permission from equal or higher privileged members can access the key by the use of topological ordering of a directed graph which includes self-loop. The main overheads such as public and private storage needs are restricted to a level that is tolerable, and the derivation of key is computationally fast and efficient. From a security perspective, the proposed scheme would be resistant to collaboration attacks and would provide key in distinguishability security. Since the key isn't stored anywhere so, the problem of a data breach is eliminated.

— The ever-increasing amount of personal or sensitive data stored in a cloud data storage needs to be protected, since losing it is a very serious problem. As their popularity increases, cloud storage is becoming an option for user in keeping their data online, it poses a lot of security threats and the challenges of protecting their data from being hacked. Recent successful attacks on cloud storage provider has implemented many security controls as a security measure, such as two (2)-factor authentication. The study aims to determine the effectiveness of the said authentication method based on the algorithm used, discuss its potential benefits and weaknesses, and provide other security measures.

Amazon Web Services Practice Lab Guide. Absolute beginners can try this lab practice guide.

Topics Covered in this Lab Guide are below

Table of Contents | Page Number

    About Author 5
    Services we provide to our customers 6
    Cloud Computing Models 7
    Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): 7
    Platform as a Service (PaaS): 7
    Software as a Service (SaaS): 7
    Amazon Free Tier Account Creation 8
    Enabling Multi-Factor Authentication to Secure Your Access 12
    Creating First Linux Instance 16
    Creating Amazon Machine Image (AMI) 21
    Create your First EC2 windows instance 23
    Assigning Elastic IP Addresses to Instance (Static IP Address) 27
    Launching RDS Instance 28
    Accessing MySQL Instance Using Workbench 36
    AWS S3 Bucket – (Object Storage) 41
    AWS S3 Lifecycle Management 43
    S3 Bucket Replication to Cross-Region 46
    S3 Bucket Policies to control Access 47
    VPC – Virtual Private Cloud (isolated Network) 48
    Create subnets 51
    Create Internet gateway and attach to VPC 52
    Create Virtual Private Gateway and Attach to VPC 52
    Create route tables and attach to subnets 53
    AWS Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) 56
    AWS CloudTrail – Enable Governance and Auditing 60
    How to Create CloudTrail 60
    Athena Analytics 61
    AWS Services and abbreviations 67

Cloud computing has formed the conceptual and infrastructural basis for tomorrow’s computing. The global computing infrastructure is rapidly moving towards cloud based architecture. While it is important to take advantages of could base computing by means of deploying it in diversified sectors, the security aspects in a cloud based computing environment remains at the core of interest. Cloud based services and service providers are being evolved which has resulted in a new business trend based on cloud technology. With the introduction of numerous cloud based services and geographically dispersed cloud service providers, sensitive information of different entities are normally stored in remote servers and locations with the possibilities of being exposed to unwanted parties in situations where the cloud servers storing those information are compromised. If security is not robust and consistent, the flexibility and advantages that cloud computing has to offer will have little credibi...

Cloud computing is an emerging area of computer technology that benefits form the processing power and the computing resources of many connected, geographically distanced computers connected via Internet. Cloud computing eliminates the need of having a complete infrastructure of hardware and software to meet users requirements and applications. It can be thought of or considered as a complete or a partial outsourcing of hardware and software resources. To access cloud applications, a good Internet connection and a standard Internet browser are required. Cloud computing has its own drawback from the security point of view; this paper aims to address most of these threats and their possible solutions.

Cloud computing is the current IT buzzword synonymous with outsourced data center management and agile solution architecture. It has the potential to improve scalability of large enterprise network delivery of services and the capability to revolutionize how data is delivered as a service. At its core, cloud computing is not a new technology but rather a new approach to distributed shared pooling of IT infrastructure linked together to offer centralized IT services on demand. The study results determined that management’s perception of security, cost-effectiveness and IT compliance factors significantly influence their decisions to adopt cloud computing. The results of multiple linear regression analysis testing in this
study showed that managements’ perception of cost effectiveness is more significantly correlated to their decision to adopt cloud computing than it is to security.

Cloud computing is growing significantly day by day, and has created a shift in the IT industry. It brings several advantages to consumers by delivering computing as a service, such as self-service, on-demand, broad network access, rapid elasticity, resource pooling, and measured service. On the other hand, organizations have many fears when deciding to migrate to cloud computing, due to the many risks they are exposed to by the cloud environment. Risk management is an appropriate method to identify, assess, and manage risks. The traditional risk management frameworks do not fit cloud computing well due to its complex environment and the assumption by those frameworks that the assets are owned and fully managed by the organization itself. The aim of this paper is to propose a new security risk management framework for the cloud computing environment. The framework focuses on the two main issues that affect the effectiveness of risk management: loss of control and the multi-tenant architecture of cloud computing. The proposed framework has been evaluated on a hypothetical cloud computing provider to present the step by step progress of the proposed framework.

In a computing context, cybersecurity is undergoing massive shifts in technology and its operations in recent days, and data science is driving the change. Extracting security incident patterns or insights from cybersecurity data and building corresponding data-driven model, is the key to make a security system automated and intelligent. To understand and analyze the actual phenomena with data, various scientific methods, machine learning techniques, processes, and systems are used, which is commonly known as data science. In this paper, I have briefly described the data science its evolution its applications in cloud security and how cybersecurity data science came in existence what kind of advantages are given by CSDS and its steps like, where the data is being gathered from relevant cybersecurity sources, and the analytics complement the latest data-driven patterns for providing more effective security solutions. The concept of cybersecurity data science allows making the computing process more actionable and intelligent as compared to traditional ones in the domain of cybersecurity. After that I have described the various upcoming challenges that can emerge after the frequent applications of cybersecurity data science(CSDS), how machine learning and deep learning are applicable in it and types of algorithms that can be applicable in it. So, the overall paper is not only focuses on the origins of Data Science but it also describes its modern uses for the relevant cyber security field and data driven intelligent decision making system can protect our system from known and unknown cyber attacks.

Web servers which provide customer services are usually connected to highly sensitive information contained backend databases. The incrementing bar of deploying such web applications initiated in ranging the corresponding bar of number of attacks that target such applications. SQL Injection Attacks come about when data provided by external user are directly included in SQL query but is not properly validated. The paper proposes a novel detection & a prevention mechanism of SQL Injection Attacks using three-tier system. As the methodology is concerned over static, dynamic & runtime detection and prevention mechanism which also filters out the malicious queries and inspires the system to be well prepared for the secure working environment, regardless of being concerned over the database server only. The cloud proposes the services like SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, DaaS, EaaS. As previous solutions are achieved for the database queries for DaaS service only, but this paper enhances the scope of other services as well. It adapts to maintain security of the whole system even when it is for any of the cloud platforms. The solution includes detection & filtration that reduces attacks to 80% in comparison to other algorithms.

Cloud computing is commonly used to represent any work done on a computer, mobile or any device, where the data and possibly the application being used do not reside on the device but rather on an unspecified device elsewhere on the Internet. The basic premise of cloud computing is that consumers (individuals, industry, government, academia and so on) pay for IT services from cloud service providers (CSP). Services offered in cloud computing are generally based on three standard models (Infrastructure-as s service, Platform-as a service, and Software as a Service) defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The reason for cloud existence is to resolve managing problems being faced for data that were excessively stored, either mandatory capacity was limited due to the infrastructure of the business, or large capacity that led to a wasted capital. Apart from those major factors such as the initial capital, capitals and the service-fix cost, the sophisticated effort for the patching, the managing and the upgrading of the internal infrastructure is a huge obstacle for firm‘s development and mobility. For many firms where client and cultural competency have not got the strength to manage large data center environments and infrastructure, it would be wise to upload their files or data backups to another machine via internet, in order to concentrate more on the organizations primary objectives.

This document provides detailed but basic information that someone wanting to enter the Cybersecurity Career Field can use to become familiar with the multiple aspects of Cybersecurity.  Likewise, most Cybersecurity professionals can use it to review and refresh themselves on the core components of Cybersecurity.

Cloud computing is one among today’s hottest research areas thanks to its ability to scale back costs related to
computing while increasing scalability and adaptability for computing services. Cloud computing is Internet based
computing thanks to shared resources, software and knowledge are provided to consumers on demand dynamically.

Cloud computing is the next generation networks which is soon going to revolutionize the computing world. It has much flexibility like on demand resources and services availability. Security is still critical challenge in the cloud computing paradigm. These challenges include user's secret data loss, data leakage and disclosing of the personal data privacy. In this paper a comprehensive survey of existing literature for cloud computing security challenges and solutions is presented. At the end of this paper the authors propose a model for cloud computing security.

https://sites.google.com/site/ijcsis/