Securing Cloud from Cloud Drain

Int. J. Advanced Networking and Applications
Volume: 6 Issue: 2 Pages: 2262-2265 (2014) ISSN : 0975-0290
2262
Securing Cloud from Cloud Drain
Niva Das
Department of Information Technology, University of Calcutta, Kolkata
Email: niva.cu@gmail.com
Tanmoy Sarkar
Neudesic India Pvt. Limited, Hyderabad, India
Email: tanmoy.sarkar@neudesic.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------ABSTRACT------------------------------------------------------------------
Today, in the world of communication, connected systems is growing at a rapid pace. To accommodate this growth
the need for computational power and storage is also increasing at a similar rate. Companies are investing a large
amount of resources in buying, maintaining and ensuring availability of the system to their customers. To mitigate
these issues, cloud computing is playing a major role [1]. The underlying concept of cloud computing dates back to
the ‘50s but the term entering into widespread usage can be traced to 2006 when Amazon.com announced the Elastic
Compute Cloud. In this paper, we will discuss about cloud security approaches. We have used the term “Cloud-
Drain” to define data leakage in case of security compromise.
Keywords - Security, Cloud Security, Cloud Drain.
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Date of Submission: July 26, 2014 Date of Acceptance: August 17,2014
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I. INTRODUCTION
In recent years cloud computing is perhaps the most
discussed topic as more and more companies are trying to
adapt and provide this service to its partners/clients. The
advantages of cloud computing is reduced maintenance, cost
efficiency, redundancy of data, scalability, increase in
storage. There are some disadvantages also like vendor
lock-in, downtime, limited control and increased
vulnerability. Cloud computing mainly provides three
models:
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) allows user to provision
their infrastructure resources to cloud. Platform as a Service
(PaaS) allows cloud providers to deliver the user
development environment services where user can develop
and run applications which are built in-house. Software as a
Service (SaaS) [13] allows the cloud provider to deliver the
capability to run their application on cloud. The applications
are accessible through thin client such as web browser Fig 1.
Figure 1
Cloud computing technology simplifies infrastructure
planning and provides business-owner the opportunity to
deploy applications on private, public, hybrid or community
clouds, based on their needs. With this advancement of
cloud where the customers can choose the type of cloud
suits, there business increases but there is increase of
security concerns and data leakage. Customers uploaded
there highly confidential data which if compromised will
drastically affect their business. Private cloud is always an
option where customer can manage their own security
policies and their resources. They will however need to
access the cloud using public networks. There are many
papers [2] [3] which do survey on cloud security, attacks
and its mitigation.
In this paper we are using a new term “cloud drain” to
acknowledge the security issues in cloud computing and
also discuss few of the mitigation problems.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
Some methods have been suggested in literature for
handling security issues in organizations implementing
cloud computing
Maggi and Zanero [16] addressed countermeasures (anti-
viruses, intrusion detection systems), developed to mitigate
well-known security threats. The focus is mainly on
anomaly-based approaches which are mostly suited for
modern protection tools and not for earlier generation
intrusion detectors. The pattern-based changes (example:
from thin client connected to the main frame or powerful
workstations connecting to thin clients) are observed, which
cause some simultaneous changes in work environment and
generates new problems to security of Cloud Computing.
Ertaul et al. [17] discussed cloud computing features like
reduced total cost of ownership and scalability issues. They
claim that cloud computing also minimizes complexity and
provides service to customers. Virtualization is the
technique used to deal with quality of service (QOS). Usage
of cloud computing is considered to be unsafe in an
organization. For dealing with this type of situation, they
investigated a few major security issues with cloud
computing and also the existing countermeasures to those

2263
security challenges. Advantages for implementing cloud
computing from a different point of view are also discussed.
Subashini and Kavitha [18] dealt with the security risks
faced in cloud computing. They provided empirical
evidence on security risks and issues encountered during
deployment of service delivery models in an organization.
The service models are placed in cloud and the empirical
validation was made in order to justify the safety of the
environment. Security was the main issue while there were
also complications with data protection and data privacy in a
continuous manner that affected the market.
Md. Tanzim Khorshed et al [19] boast that cloud computing
helps reduce cost of services and improves business
outcomes. But to market this and popularize its use by IT
user community, there are many security risks to be solved.
They also mentioned that cloud services pose an attractive
target for cyber-attacks and criminal activities. This is due to
the fact that these services have sensitive information from
many organizations and individuals, stored in their
repositories.
Iliana Iankoulova et al [20] have performed a systematic
review to identify which security requirements need to be
further researched. From this review they found that
nonrepudiation, physical protection, recovery and
prosecution are the least researched in security areas.
Integrity, access control and security auditing are the most
popular addition to security requirements; solutions to these
identified challenges were also mentioned. Vasudevan et al.
[9] described a novel multipath approach of data
communication to improve security; this will be relevant to
transfer of data to and fro from the cloud. Christodorescu et
al. [11] provided a thorough analysis of cloud security and
provided how it is different from virtualization security
issues.
III. CLOUD DRAIN
The term cloud-drain is used to signify the data leakage in
case of security compromise in cloud computing. Intrusion
plays a major role in this part. An intrusion consists of an
attack exploiting a security flaw and a consequent breach
which is the resulting violation of the explicit or implicit
security policy of the system. Here we discuss about
intrusion techniques and how they will effectively allow
cloud drain possible. Intrusion Detection techniques could
be used to prevent a great deal of intrusion which affects
the stored data in the cloud. [21] [22] and [24]. Neural
networks and application in Cloud Security is also a well-
researched area [23].
Cloud systems are susceptible to all typical network and
computer security attacks. The targets that are possibly
vulnerable are the protocol stack; network devices;
processes running in kernel space, such as operating system
daemons; and processes running outside kernel space, such
as cloud middleware, cloud applications, and any non-
cloud applications running with either root or user
privileges. Classification of cloud intrusions is given as
follows:
1) Unauthorized Access: A break-in committed by an
intruder who can pose as a legitimate cloud user if the
credentials is obtained by stealing, brute force or careless
disclosure, then it can cause devastating results. Man-in-
the- middle attack can also be a possibility to gain
illegitimate user access. During 2010, only 4 million user
accounts were compromised by hackers; in 2011 hackers
penetrated 174 million accounts (thanks, Anonymous),
according to the Data Breach Investigations
Report published by Verizon in March[10].
2) Network Attack: Attacks performed with the help of
tools or exploit scripts that target vulnerabilities existent in
cloud protocols, services and applications. They may
appear in the form of DOS attacks, probes, and worms, and
may leave their traces at several locations of cloud’s
organization.
3) Data Security: Data in cloud is stored in different
geographical locations. Cloud providers are providing
maximum security to these places. But since the consumers
are unaware of physical locations, data breach is always a
possible and valuable data may disappear without a trace. A
malicious user of a Virtual Machine (VM) or careless cloud
provider could be responsible for data loss. Also, natural
disaster can cause data loss if data is not properly
distributed. Data duplication in a remote cloud at periodic
interval is a possible solution to mitigate such issues.
The Cloud Security Alliance found the below few
mentioned threats that can lead to cloud drain:
Failures in Provider Security, Attacks by Customers,
Unavailability and Untrustworthiness Issues, Legal and
Regulatory Issues, Data Loss, Account hack.
All these threat can lead to cloud drain and drastically
affect the cloud consumers. Fundamentally the cloud
security model involves of cloud providers, service
providers and cloud consumers. Each entity has their own
security policies and management. So, before engaging to
cloud services, all the three entities need to negotiate and
come to an agreement. The security gap can be explored in
more detail and leads to security attacks which in turn may
lead to cloud drain.
IV. CLOUD DRAIN PREVENTION
Securing VM’s operating system, repositories and network
can prevent cloud drain in physical servers. Many tenants
VM’s are sharing the same infrastructure and may lead to
security vulnerabilities. One potential risk has to do with
the potential to compromise a virtual machine. Virtual
machine compromise can cause major impact and
destruction. This requires an additional degree of network
isolation and enhanced detection by security monitoring.
For this, hypervisors are used because at present there are
no documented attacks against hypervisors, reducing the
likelihood of attack. So, the vulnerability of the hypervisor
and the probability of an attack are low [4].
Data security [5] is another important aspect in cloud
computing. Many organizations [7] and researchers [6] [8]
have implemented encryption for data security; but they

2264
often overlooked inherent weaknesses in key management
and data access.
If encryption keys are not protected, they are susceptible to
theft by malevolent hackers. Vulnerability also lies in the
access control model; thus, if keys are appropriately
protected but access is not sufficiently controlled or robust;
malicious or compromised personnel can attempt to access
sensitive data by assuming the identity of an authorized
user.
First, we need to make sure that data is not readable and
that the solution offers strong key management. Second,
implement access policies that ensure only authorized users
can gain access to sensitive information, so that even
privileged users such as root user cannot view sensitive
information [15]. Third, incorporate security intelligence
that generates log information, which can be used for
behavioral analysis to provide alerts that trigger when users
are performing actions outside of the norm.
Use advance automatic switches which provides packet rate
inspection and bogus IP filtering (Bogon filtering).
Intelligent hardware that is Application Front end hardware
device is placed on the network which analyzes the data
packets entering the network system and identifies that
whether they are based on priority, regular or dangerous.
DoS attacks [12] and Malware-Injection Attack Solution is
to deploy a Hypervisor in the provider’s side. This
Hypervisor will be considered the mainly secured and
complicated part of the cloud system whose protection
cannot be breached by any means. The Hypervisor is
responsible for arrangement of all the Instances. It cannot
be denied that there are risks associated with sharing the
same physical infrastructure between a set of multiple
users, even one being malicious can cause threats to the
others using the same infrastructure [14], and hence
security with respect to hypervisor is of great concern as all
the guest systems are controlled by it for avoiding a
flooding attack; our projected approach is to categorize all
the servers in the cloud system as a cluster of fleet of
servers. Each fleet of servers will be elected for particular
type of job, in this; all servers in the fleet will have inside
communication along with themselves through message
passing. So when a server is loaded, a latest server will be
installed in the fleet and the name server, which has the
entire records of the existing states of the servers, will
renew the target for the requests with the latest included
server.[10]
V. CONCLUSION
Although security researches are done in many fields like
Ad-hoc networks [25] [26], mobile computing [27], sensor
networks [28], radio networks etc. but cloud computing is
always exposed to security threats varying from network
level threats to application level threats. In order to keep
the Cloud secure, these security threats need to be
controlled. Moreover data residing in the cloud is also
prone to a number of threats and various issues like:
confidentiality and integrity of data should be considered
while buying storage services from a cloud service
provider. Inspecting of the Cloud regularly needs to be
done to safeguard the cloud against external threats and
avoid cloud drain
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Authors Biography
Niva Das has done her M.Tech from
University of Calcutta, Kolkata. She has
done her specialization on Information
Technology. Her research interests are
security and networking.
Tanmoy Sarkar has done his M.Tech
(Gold Medalist) from Jadavpur University,
Kolkata. He has done his specialization in
Distributed and Mobile computing. His
research interests are security, sensor
networks and mobile computing.

Securing Cloud from Cloud Drain

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