A Survey of Traditional and Cloud Specific Security Issues

Abstract

The emerging technology popularly referred to as Cloud computing offers dynamically scalable computing resources on a pay per use basis over the Internet. Companies avail hardware and software resources as service from the cloud service provider as opposed to obtaining physical assets. Cloud computing has the potential for significant cost reduction and increased operating efficiency in computing. To achieve these benefits, however, there are still some challenges to be solved. Security is one of the prime concerns in adopting Cloud computing, since the user's data has to be released from the protection sphere of the data owner to the premises of cloud service provider. As more Cloud based applications keep evolving, the associated security threats are also growing. In this paper an attempt has been made to identify and categorize the security threats applicable to Cloud environment. Threats are classified into Cloud specific security issues and traditional security attacks on various service delivery models of Cloud. The work also briefly discusses the virtualization and authentication related issues in Cloud and tries to consolidate the various security threats in a classified manner. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.