1. Security in Cloud Computing
Thanks to Research talk at UA | Ragib Hasan | | UAB CIS 12/02/11
Also, from talk by Calvin Vreeland

2. Security How do you know data in cloud is safe and secure?
Even reputable providers can be hacked

3. What the “experts” are saying?
[Cloud Computing] is a security nightmare and it can't be handled in traditional ways.
John Chambers
CISCO CEO
It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity
Richard Stallman
GNU

4. Businesses don’t trust clouds (yet)
Almost 75% of business CFOs are still afraid to use clouds for sensitive data due to lack of security

5. Traditional systems security vs Cloud Computing Security
Securing a traditional system
Securing a cloud

6. Traditional systems security vs Cloud Computing Security
Analogy
Securing a house
Securing a motel
Owner and user are often the same entity
Owner and users are almost invariably distinct entities

7. Traditional systems security vs Cloud Computing Security
Securing a house
Securing a motel
Biggest user concerns
Securing perimeter
Checking for intruders
Securing assets
Biggest user concern
Securing room against (the bad guy in next room | hotel owner)

8. Cloud security involves securing across multiple dimensions of the cloud
Data and computation integrity and confidentiality
Infrastructure, topology
Data Privacy
Networking
Forensics

9. Research on Cloud Computing Security: A High Level View
Novel attacks
Trustworthy cloud architectures
Data integrity and availability
Computation integrity
Data and computation privacy
Data forensics
Misbehavior detection
Malicious use of clouds
Economic attacks

10. Co-tenancy in clouds creates new attack vectors
A cloud is shared by multiple users
Malicious users can now legally be in the same infrastructure
Misusing co-tenancy, attackers can launch side channel attacks on victims
any attack based on information gained from the physical implementation of a cryptosystem, rather than brute force or theoretical weaknesses in the algorithms. E.g., timing information, power consumption, electromagnetic leaks or even sound can provide an extra source of information which can be exploited to break the system
Example: the Topology attack on Amazon EC2 (“Hey You! Get off of my Cloud …” CCS 2009)

11. Today’s cloud architectures act like big black boxes
Clients have no idea of or control over what is happening inside the cloud
Clients are forced to trust cloud providers completely
Existing Approaches: TCCP (uses TPM), CloudProof
The Trusted Platform Module (TPM) installed on certain motherboards is an extra chip that is designed to aid in the generation of certain types of cryptographic keys to use in various parts of the computer.

12. Today’s clouds provide no guarantee about outsourced data
Problem:
Dishonest cloud providers can throw data away or lose data.
Malicious intruders can delete or tamper with data.
Clients need reassurance that the outsourced data is available, has not been tampered with, and remains confidential.
Example Approaches: Provable Data Possession (PDP), Proof of Retrievability (PoR), HAIL

13. Ensuring confidentiality of data in outsourced computation is difficult
Most type of computations require decrypting data before any computations
If the cloud provider is not trusted, this may result in breach of confidentiality
Existing Approaches: Homomorphic encryption, TCCP

14. Privacy is often the victim when using a cloud …
It is almost impossible to provide privacy of sensitive personal information in computation outsourcing
Using Google spreadsheets to maintain SSN
Popular distributed computation systems such as MapReduce are NOT designed with privacy in mind

15. Clients have no way of verifying computations outsourced to a Cloud
Scenario
User sends her data processing job to the cloud.
Clouds provide dataflow operation as a service (e.g., MapReduce, Hadoop etc.)
Problem: Users have no way of evaluating the correctness of results
Existing Approaches: Runtime Attestation, Majority voting, Redundant operations

16. Assessing the Capability of a Cloud Provider is difficult due to the black box model
Availability, fault-tolerance, and resilience are important to clients for mission-critical data
But cloud providers do not want to reveal their capability or redundancy
So, clients need a way to remotely verify the capability claims

17. Data Forensics in Clouds is difficult
Certain Government regulations mandate the ability to audit and run forensic analysis on critical business or healthcare data
Clouds complicate forensic analysis, since the same storage infrastructure is shared by many clients
Cloud providers are not willing to open up their entire storage for forensic investigations.

18. Clouds can be used for malicious purposes
Adversaries can rent clouds temporarily to create a large scale botnet very quickly (collection of interconnected programs)
Clouds can be used for spamming, Denial of service, brute force password breaking, and other attacks
Example: WPACracker.com – Claims to break WPA passwords for $17 in under 20 minutes, using a cloud

19. Economy matters!
Sometimes, economic targets are more effective than technical targets
Attacks can target economic viability of cloud users (by consuming extra resources), or of cloud providers (by fraudulently consuming cloud resources)

20. Hassan strategy Question: How can we make clouds more accountable?
Approach: By maintaining secure and verifiable provenance chains for all data and computations outsourced to a cloud, clients can get more accountability.
Provenance of data
What happened to the data object while it was inside the cloud? (i.e., entire history of the data object)
Provenance of computations
How was a particular result computed inside a cloud?
Challenges: How to ensure correct collection of provenance inside a cloud, even when the cloud provider may not be trustworthy?

21. (Largely) Unexplored Areas
Legal/policy issues and regulatory compliance:
How does cloud computing fit in with data security laws and regulations such as SOX, HIPAA? Sarbanes Oxley – result of Enron, accuracy of financial reporting data
For example,
If I store my data in Amazon, can the Govt. subpoena Amazon to access my data without violating 4th amendment?
unreasonable search and seizure
Will a cloud based storage system comply with SOX?

22. Issues related to users of the cloud
Sensitive Information
SLA may allow access and catalog and use info in ways never intended
Share data with marketing firm
Google’s policy – company will share data with gov if “good faith belief” access is necessary to fulfill lawful requests
Government can more easily subpoena 3rd party than privately owned
Closed Subpoena – provider legally prohibited from telling customers data has been given to the government
Google’s problem or SLA may say not responsible

23. Today’s clouds provide no guarantee about outsourced data
Amazon’s Terms of services
Updated

24. The government – yes it can be good
Governmental regulations:
If doing business for EU, cannot store in US
If credit card data, restrictions on where can store data, cannot allow free block to be included in another customer’s block of storage

25. Examples of problems
AOL releated 650k customer search terms on public web page
MS released search data to US DOD in child porn case
British gov misplaced 25 M taxpayer records
Retailers lose credit card numbers

26. Anecdotes “A short account of an interesting or amusing interesting story about a real incident or person”nature” 26

27. Why?
Now OneDrive
Allows users to upload and sync files to a cloud storage

28. Sorry, your account has been disabled. [?] That’s it.
Locked Out
Nick Saber isn’t happy now. Monday afternoon, after lunch, Nick came back from lunch to find out that he couldn’t get into his Gmail account. Further, he couldn’t get into anything that Google made (beside search) where his account credentials once worked. When attempting to log in, Nick got a single line message:
Sorry, your account has been disabled. [?]
That’s it.
No, Google, that’s not it. Somewhere, deep inside the bowels of Google-land, something went wrong and an innocent person suffers the loss of his data.
This is serious failure!
One point the story highlights is a hard lesson for users: Don’t trust the cloud at this early stage in its evolution. 28

29. Cloud Goes Dark
Amazon.com Web Service's hosted storage service went down Friday morning, frustrating many Web site customers and refreshing concerns with the ballyhooed approach of cloud computing.
An online forum spiked with customer complaints Friday morning as some people found that content stored on Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) was unavailable or performed slowly.
The service was restored a few hours later, according to an Amazon technician. The first forum posting was timed at 5 a.m. PT, and the service was back up at just past 9 a.m.
The glitch sent a ripple through the blogosphere as Web entrepreneurs, who are increasingly using Amazon's hosted computing services, pondered whether they needed a back-up plan or a more traditional hosting provider.
On the forum, some people complained about how the service glitch essentially put them out of business temporarily. 29

30. Google Docs Down
Google's Documents and Spreadsheets service went down for approximately 45 minutes earlier this morning.
The service, Google's online productivity suite, went from having some features not working, like the log-out button and the document creation drop-down menu, to coming up with a 404 page.
The downtime calls into question the importance that online Web applications play in business use, as well as how Google's free document services have come to replace software solutions such as Microsoft Office for some users or teams that use Google's real-time collaboration features. 30

31. Digital Railroad
"Everyone is downloading now and their FTP has slowed to a crawl," one Digital Railroad member told News Photographer magazine earlier this afternoon, before the site went dark. It's estimated that there may have been as many as 1,900 client archives on Digital Railroad's servers as of today. 31

32. Security Benefits in the Cloud
Centralized data – can make it more secure
Reduced data loss (12K laptops lost in US airports)
How secure are laptops?
If limit employee downloads, can limit data loss
Easier to monitor security if only one location
Can move data to another machine
Logging is better in the cloud (C2 audit trail)
High overhead, but the cloud can handle it

33. Security Benefits in the Cloud
Security bundled in, no need to buy 3rd party security SW
Can perform patches and upgrades offline, test off-line versions of production environment
Vendors more likely to develop more efficient security SW
SaaS/PaaS providers do security testing (lower cost for security testing split amongst all users)

34. Regulatory Issues No existing regulation
Despite its size, Google could still fail (look at GM or those banks that were too big to fail…)
Government backed insurance?
Should government regulate the cloud?
Safe guard for loss or theft?
Who owns the data?
Law enforcement easier access to cloud than PC?

35. Regulatory Issues
Do people really understand privacy and security implications of , Facebook, etc?
US courts ruled private data in cloud does not have same level of protection from law enforcement searches
49% concerned if cloud shared files with law
80% concerned if used photos for marketing
68% concerned is used personal information for personalized ads
63% concerned if provider kept data after used deleted

36. Regulatory Issues Should government agencies store data on clouds?
Procurement regulations will have to change
GSA pushing for cloud to reduce energy
US gov. spends $480 M on electricity for computers

37. Security in Clouds Security hackers:
Sell proprietary info to competition
Encrypt storage until pay (ransom/blackmal?)
Erase everything to damage business
DDOS, botnets attack network
Tokyo firm pay $31K to stop it
Not even clear who should pay ransom
In a cloud at the mercy of their security measures

38. Final Observations: What’s wrong with today’s cloud security research
Failure to look at reality
Many security schemes impose unrealistic overheads (e.g., >35%!!) – no one will use them in real life clouds
Failure to consider economy
Security schemes would cause significant changes to existing cloud infrastructures
Many attacks simply don’t make any economic sense
Lack of realistic threat models
Many papers present unrealistic threat models, (“Solutions in search of a problem”)

39. Clouds can be used for malicious purposes
Adversaries can rent clouds temporarily to create a large scale botnet very quickly
Clouds can be used for spamming, Denial of service, brute force password breaking, and other attacks
Example: WPACracker.com – Claims to break WPA passwords for $17 in under 20 minutes, using a cloud

40. Cloud Computing...... Design for Disaster?40