International Journal of Computer Science & Information Technology (IJCSIT) Vol 5, No 3, June 2013
DOI : 10.5121/ijcsit.2013.5306 79
SECURITY THREATS ON CLOUD COMPUTING
VULNERABILITIES
Te-Shun Chou
Department of Technology Systems, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC, U.S.A.
ABSTRACT
Clouds provide a powerful computing platform that enables individuals and organizations to perform
variety levels of tasks such as: use of online storage space, adoption of business applications,
development of customized computer software, and creation of a “realistic” network environment. In
previous years, the number of people using cloud services has dramatically increased and lots of data has
been stored in cloud computing environments. In the meantime, data breaches to cloud services are also
increasing every year due to hackers who are always trying to exploit the security vulnerabilities of the
architecture of cloud. In this paper, three cloud service models were compared; cloud security risks and
threats were investigated based on the nature of the cloud service models. Real world cloud attacks were
included to demonstrate the techniques that hackers used against cloud computing systems. In addition,
countermeasures to cloud security breaches are presented.
KEYWORDS
Cloud computing, cloud security threats and countermeasures, cloud service models
1. INTRODUCTION
Cloud computing has been involved in everyone's life. It delivers applications and storage
spaces as services over the Internet for little to no cost. Most of us utilize cloud computing
services on a daily basis. For example, we use web-based email systems (e.g. Yahoo and
Google) to exchange messages with others; social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn,
MySpace, and Twitter) to share information and stay in contact with friends; on-demand
subscription services (e.g. Netflix and Hulu) to watch TV shows and movies; cloud storages
(e.g. Humyo, ZumoDrive, and Dropbox) to store music, videos, photos and documents online;
collaboration tools (e.g. Google docs) to work with people on the same document in real time;
and online backup tools (e.g. JungleDisk, Carbonite, and Mozy) to automatically back up our
data to cloud servers. Cloud computing has also been involved in businesses; companies rent
services from cloud computing service providers to reduce operational costs and improve cash
flow. For example, the social news website, reddit, rents Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
for their digital bulletin board service. The digital photo sharing website, SmugMug, rents
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) for their photo hosting service. The automaker, Mazda
USA, rents Rackspace for their marketing advertisements. The software company, HRLocker,
rents Windows Azure for their human resources software service.
There is no doubt that the convenience and low cost of cloud computing services have changed
our daily lives; however, the security issues associated with cloud computing make us
vulnerable to cybercrimes that happen every day. Hackers employ a variety of techniques to
gain access to clouds without legal authorization or disrupt services on clouds in order to
achieve specific objectives. Hackers could trick a cloud into treating their illegal activity as a
valid instance, therefore, gaining unauthorized access to the information stored in the cloud.