Security issues in cloud computing

Cloud computing consists of applications, platforms and infrastructure segments. Every segment performs different operations and offers different products for businesses and individuals around the world. There are numerous security issues for cloud computing as it encompasses many technologies which includes networks, databases, operating systems, virtualization, resource scheduling, transaction management, concurrency control and memory management. Therefore, security issues for many of these systems and technologies are applicable to cloud computing. Data security involves encrypting the data as well as ensuring that appropriate policies are enforced for data sharing. The given below are the various security concerns in a cloud computing environment.

 •  Access to Servers &Applications

•  Data Transmission

•  Virtual Machine Security

•  Network Security

•  Data Security

•  Data Privacy

•  Data Integrity

•  Data Location

•  Data Availability

•  Data Segregation

•  Security Policy and Compliance

4.1 Data Transmission

It is the process of sending digital or analog data over a communication medium to one or more computing network. In Cloud environment most of the data is not encrypted in the processing time. To process data for any application that data must be unencrypted. In homomorphism encryption which allows the data to be processed without being decrypted. The attack is carried out when the attackers place themselves in the communications path between the users. Here there is the possibility that they can interrupt and change communications.

4.2 Virtual Machine Security

The term Virtual Machine (VM) describes sharing the resources of one single physical computer into various computers within itself. VM’s provide agility, flexibility and scalability to the cloud resources by allowing the vendors to copy, move and manipulate their VM’s. Keeping this in mind, malicious hackers are finding ways to get their hands on valuable data by manipulating safeguards and breaching the security layers of cloud environments. The cloud computing scenario is not as transparent as it claims to be. The service user has no idea about how the data is processed and stored and cannot directly control the flow of data storage and processing. Having VM’s would indirectly allows anyone access to the host disk of the VM to take an illegal copy of the whole system.        

4.3 Data Integrity

Corruption of data can happen at any level of storage. So Integrity monitoring is must in cloud storage. Data Integrity in a system is maintained via database constraints and transactions. Transactions should follow ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability). Data generated by cloud computing services are kept in the clouds. Keeping data in the clouds, users may lose control of their data and rely on cloud operators to enforce access control.

4.4 Data Location

Cloud users are not aware of the exact location of the datacenter and also they don’t have any control over the physical access to that data. Most of the cloud providers have data centers around the world. In many countries certain types of data cannot leave the country because of potentially sensitive information. Next in the complexity chain there are distributed systems in which there are multiple databases and multiple applications.