Secure Cloud Computing

This book presents a range of cloud computing security challenges and promising solution paths. The first two chapters focus on practical considerations of cloud computing. In Chapter 1, Chandramouli, Iorga, and Chokani describe the evolution of cloud computing and the current state of practice, followed by the challenges of cryptographic key management in the cloud. In Chapter 2, Chen and Sion present a dollar cost model of cloud computing and explore the economic viability of cloud computing with and without security mechanisms involving cryptographic mechanisms. The next two chapters address security issues of the cloud infrastructure. In Chapter 3, Szefer and Lee describe a hardware-enhanced security architecture that protects the confidentiality and integrity of a virtual machine’s memory from an untrusted or malicious hypervisor. In Chapter 4, Tsugawa et al. discuss the security issues introduced when Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is deployed within and across clouds. Chapters 5-9 focus on the protection of data stored in the cloud. In Chapter 5, Wang et al. present two storage isolation schemes that enable cloud users with high security requirements to verify that their disk storage is isolated from some or all other users, without any cooperation from cloud service providers. In Chapter 6, De Capitani di Vimercati, Foresti, and Samarati describe emerging approaches for protecting data stored externally and for enforcing fine-grained and selective accesses on them, and illustrate how the combination of these approaches can introduce new privacy risks. In Chapter 7, Le, Kant, and Jajodia explore data access challenges in collaborative enterprise computing environments where multiple parties formulate their own authorization rules, and discuss the problems of rule consistency, enforcement, and dynamic updates. In Chapter 8, Smith et al. address key challenges to the practical realization of a system that supports query execution over remote encrypted data