SECURITY ISSUES IN CLOUD COMPUTING

ABSTRACT
Cloud Computing is a widely emerging technology and has grown from being a promising business concept to fastest developing segments of IT industries. The deployment strategy involved in a cloud environment includes the components of grid computing, parallel computing, and utility computing. Cloud computing has many advantages like large-scale data computation, data storage, virtualisation and centralized management. This rapid transitioning into cloud computing has concerns over secure communication in information systems. This paper discusses the various security issues in cloud computing namely data security, privacy protection; data interface issues and infected applications. Each security issue is analysed in depth and solutions are provided thereby providing better performance and reliability.
1. INTRODUCTION:
Cloud computing provides a way of accessing information from anywhere and at any time. The word c loud is used as a metaphor for the Internet [1]. It is a service for subscribing the data over a network. For example: Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail etc., have all the necessary hardware and software requireme nts to deal with the personal information. The email services are not restricted to a personal computer rather provided as a service in general, thus making it a cloud.

Fig 1: Cloud computing: A bird’s eye view
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There are three basic models in cloud [2]:
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Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)

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Platform as a service (PaaS)

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Application as a service (AaaS)

Fig 2: Denotes functionalities of each service models in cloud.
The cloud could be deployed in four different forms. Each of the deployment strategy provides different perspectives to the cloud. They are [3]:
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Public Cloud

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Private cloud

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Hybrid cloud

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Community cloud

Public Cloud:
The resources such as application and storage are provided to the public without any restriction.
It provides easy and inexpensive set-up because the provider covers hardware, application and bandwidth costs.

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Private Cloud:
Private cloud is for computing a system that provides services to a limited number of people behind a firewall. Gives more control for administration.
Hybrid Cloud:
A hybrid cloud is a combination of at least one private cloud and at least one public cloud. Also gives the best out of both for the cloud.
Community cloud:
A community cloud is a multi-tenant infrastructure that is shared among several organizations from a specific group with common computing concerns. These concerns might be related to regulatory compliance, such as audit requirements, or may be related to performance requirements. Our research is mainly focusing on the security issues related to cloud computing. The cloud offers lot of advantages to businesses including decreased expense and expenditures related to hardware and software maintenance [4]. Cloud if infected would pose a bigger threat to the resources connected with it. For example: cybercriminals create a bigger problem for the cloud. "These 'dark' for-profit cloud-computing networks, known as botnets, can run millions of infected computers, called bots, which spread malware. Undetected botnets can steal enough computing power to bring down your network and your business " [5]. Security issues faced by the cloud are:
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Data issues

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Privacy issues

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Infected application issues

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Interface issues at user/provider level

Authors of the paper have given solutions for each of the security issues. Further, the paper would explain how the data could be consolidated in a smarter way, privacy protection plan and policies incorporated, preventing applications to get infected and the interface issues faced by users and the providers therefore providing better use of cloud.
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2. RELATED WORKS
Mladen [6] states that after many years of research in the field of networking, a new concept of resource sharing and file handling has evolved. This new concept is coined as cloud