• Shared technology vulnerabilities—IaaS vendors deliver their services in a scalable way, sharing infrastructure. Often, the underlying components making up this infrastructure (e.g., CPU caches, graphics processing units [GPUs]) are not designed to offer strong isolation properties for multitenant architectures. To address this gap, a virtualization hypervisor mediates access between guest OSs computers and the physical computer resources. Still, as noted previously, hypervisors have exhibited flaws, enabling guest OSs to gain inappropriate levels of control or influence on the underlying cloud platform.
Attacks have surfaced in recent years that target the shared technology inside cloud computing environments. Disk partitions, CPU caches, GPUs and other shared elements were never designed for strong compartmentalization. As a result, attackers focus on how to impact the operations of other cloud customers and how to gain unauthorized access to data. • Data loss/leakage—As in traditional IT operations, there are many ways for data to be compromised in the cloud. Deletion or alteration of records without a backup is an obvious example. For encrypted data in an IaaS cloud, the loss of an encoding key could effectively mean data destruction. Access in public cloud environments (again, multitenant environments) can result in hundreds or more of possible users just one level of security away from the sensitive data of other cloud clients. • Account, service and traffic hijacking—Account or service hijacking is not new, but as it does with many types of risk, cloud computing adds new dimensions. When attackers gain access to cloud client user credentials, they are able to “eavesdrop” on activities and transactions, manipulate data, return falsified information, and redirect cloud client e-commerce customers to illegitimate sites.
IaaS applications can become new bases for an attacker. From here, the attacker may leverage the use of the cloud client’s brand recognition to launch attacks on the cloud client’s unsuspecting e-commerce customers. • Unknown risk profiles—A tenet of cloud computing is the reduction of expenses to cloud users of IT hardware, software and maintenance. The cloud is intended to allow enterprises to focus on their core competencies, remotely outsourcing a portion or most of their IT. The financial and operational benefits have been promoted by cloud promoters and IT experts since the emergence of this technology.
With this promise of better, cheaper and faster IT, the security ramifications of virtual computing, outside the traditional physical IT enterprise, can become minimized. This is especially true as increasing numbers of organizational decision makers have personal virtual backgrounds (online social networking, shopping, entertainment, etc.). They see cloud computing as accepted and used extensively in culture and wonder why this is not the case for business and commerce as well.
Data, which may be widely dispersed among many cloud-based servers, is often described as a security asset. Security by obscurity may result in unknown exposures. It definitely impairs the in-depth analysis required for highly controlled or regulated business process.