What's New About Cloud Computing Security?

Abstract

While the economic case for cloud computing is compelling, the security challenges it poses are equally striking. In this work we strive to frame the full space of cloud-computing security issues, attempting to separate justified concerns from possible over-reactions. We examine contemporary and historical perspectives from industry, academia, government, and “black hats”. We argue that few cloud computing security issues are fundamentally new or fundamentally intractable; often what appears “new” is so only relative to “traditional” computing of the past several years. Looking back further to the time-sharing era, many of these problems already received attention. On the other hand, we argue that two facets are to some degree new and fundamental to cloud computing: the complexities ofmulti-party trust considerations, and the ensuing need formutual auditability.