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Secure Cloud Architecture

Article · January 2013

DOI: 10.5121/acij.2013.4102

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 Advanced Computing: An International Journal ( ACIJ ), Vol.4, No.1, January 2013

SECURE CLOUD ARCHITECTURE

Kashif Munir1 and Prof Dr. Sellapan Palaniappan2
1
School of Science and Engineering, Malaysia University of Science and Technology,
Selangor, Malaysia
kashifbwp@hotmail.com
2
School of Science and Engineering, Malaysia University of Science and Technology,
Selangor, Malaysia
sell@must.edu.my

ABSTRACT
Cloud computing is set of resources and services offered through the Internet. Cloud
services are delivered from data centers located throughout the world. Cloud computing
facilitates its consumers by providing virtual resources via internet. The biggest challenge in
cloud computing is the security and privacy problems caused by its multi-tenancy nature and the
outsourcing of infrastructure, sensitive data and critical applications. Enterprises are rapidly adopting
cloud services for their businesses, measures need to be developed so that organizations can be assured
of security in their businesses and can choose a suitable vendor for their computing needs. Cloud
computing depends on the internet as a medium for users to access the required services at any time on
pay-per-use pattern. However this technology is still in its initial stages of development, as it suffers
from threats and vulnerabilities that prevent the users from trusting it. Various malicious activities
from illegal users have threatened this technology such as data misuse, inflexible access control and
limited monitoring. The occurrence of these threats may result into damaging or illegal access of
critical and confidential data of users. In this paper we identify the most vulnerable security
threats/attacks in cloud computing, which will enable both end users and vendors t o k n o w a b o u t
the k e y se c ur it y threats associated with cloud computing and propose relevant solution directives to
strengthen security in the Cloud environment. We also propose secure cloud architecture for
organizations to strengthen the security.

KEYWORDS
Cloud Computing; Security and Privacy; Threats, Vulnerabilities, Secure Cloud Architecture.

1. INTRODUCTION
With Cloud Computing becoming a popular term on the Information Technology (IT) market,
security and accountability has become important issues to highlight. There are a number of
security issues/concerns associated with cloud computing but these issues fall into two broad
categories: Security issues faced by cloud providers (organizations providing Software-,
Platform-, or Infrastructure-as-a-Service via the cloud) and security issues faced by their
customers.[1] In most cases, the provider must ensure that their infrastructure is secure and that
their clients’ data and applications are protected while the customer must ensure that the
provider has taken the proper security measures to protect their information.[2]
Cloud computing has emerged as a way for IT businesses to increase capabilities on the fly
without investing much in new infrastructure, training of personals or licensing new software
[3].

DOI : 10.5121/acij.2013.4102 9
 Advanced Computing: An International Journal ( ACIJ ), Vol.4, No.1, January 2013

Figure 1: Cloud Computing represented as a stack of service

NIST defines Cloud computing as a “model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on demand
network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly
provisioned and delivered with minimal managerial effort or service provider interaction” [4]. It
follows a simple “pay as you go” model, which allows an organization to pay for only the
service they use. It eliminates the need to maintain an in-house data center by migrating
enterprise data to a remote location at the Cloud provider’s site. Minimal investment, cost
reduction, and rapid deployment are the main factors that drive industries to utilize Cloud
services and allow them to focus on core business concerns and priorities rather than dealing
with technical issues. According to [5], 91 % of the organizations in US and Europe agreed that
reduction in cost is a major reason for them to migrate to Cloud environment.
As shown in Figure. 1, Cloud services are offered in terms of Infrastructure-as-a- service (IaaS),
Platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-service (SaaS). It follows a bottom-up
approach wherein at the infrastructure level; machine power is de- livered in terms of CPU
consumption to memory allocation. On top of it, lies the layer that delivers an environment in
terms of framework for application development, termed as PaaS. At the top level resides the
application layer, delivering software outsourced through the Internet, eliminating the need for
in-house maintenance of sophisticated software [6]. At the application layer, the end users can
utilize software running at a remote site by Application Service Providers (ASPs). Here,
customers need not buy and install costly software. They can pay for the usage and their
concerns for maintenance are removed.

2. RELATED WORK
In [7] the authors discussed the security issues in a cloud computing environment. They
focused on technical security issues arising from the usage of cloud services. They discussed
security threats presented in the cloud such as VM-Level attacks, isolation failure,
management interface compromise and compliance risks and their mitigation. They also
presented cloud security architecture, using which; organizations can protect themselves
against threats and attacks. According to the authors the key points for this architecture are:
single-sign on, increased availability, defense in depth approach, single management console
and Virtual Machine (VM) protection.

In [8] the authors analyzed vulnerabilities and security risks specific to cloud computing
systems. They defined four indicators for cloud-specific vulnerability including: 1) it is

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intrinsic to or prevalent in core technology of cloud computing, 2) it has its root in one of
NIST’s essential cloud characteristics, 3) it is caused by cloud innovations making security
controls hard to implement, 4) it is prevalent in established state-of-the- art cloud offerings. The
authors were certain that additional cloud-specific vulnerabilities will be identified; others will
become less of an issue as the field of cloud computing matures. However, they believe
that using a precise definition of what constitutes vulnerability and the four indicators
they identified will provide a level of precision and clarity that the current discourse about
cloud computing security often lacks.

In [9] the author discussed some vital issues to ensure a secure cloud environment. This
included a basic view of security policies (e.g., inside threats, access control and system
portability), software security (e.g., virtualization technology, host operating system, guest
operating system and data encryption) and hardware security (e.g., backup, server location
and firewall). The author concluded that an important issue for the future of cloud security is
the use of open standards to avoid problems such as vendor lock-in and incompatibility.
Furthermore, the author believes that although there are no security standards specific to cloud
computing, conventional security concepts can be usefully applied.

La‘Quata Sumter et al. [10] sa ys: The rise in the scope of cloud computing has brought
fear about the Internet security and the threat of security in cloud computing is continuously
increasing. Consumers of the cloud computing services have serious concerns about the
availability of their data when required. Users have server concern about the security and
access mechanism i n c l o u d computing environment. To assure users that there information is
secure, safe not accessible to unauthorized people, they have proposed the design of a system
that will capture the movement and processing of the information kept on the cloud. They have
identified there is need of security capture device on the cloud, which will definitely ensure
users that their information is secure and safe from security threats and attacks. The
proposed implementation is based on a case study and is implemented in a small cloud
computing environment. They have claimed that there proposed security model for cloud
computing is a practical model cloud computing.
The advantage of their work is assurance of security to the end users of cloud. The limitation of
this study is there proposed framework is not feasible for large scale cloud computing
environments.
Meiko Jensen et al. [11] have shown that to improve cloud computing security, the security
capabilities of both web browsers and web service frameworks, should be strengthened. This
can best be done by integrating the latter into the former.

M. Jensen et al. [12] focus on special type of Denial of Service attacks on network based service
that relies on message flooding techniques, overloading the victims with invalid requests. They
describe some well known and some rather new attacks and discuss commonalities and
approaches for countermeasures.

Armbust M Fox et al. [13] discuss that resources should be virtualized to hide the
implementation of how they are multiplexed and shared.

Wayne [14]: In this paper benefits of cloud computing are highlighted along with the basic
security issues that are still associated with cloud services. Shaping the security of critical
systems is very important. Addressing the security issues faced by end users is extremely
mandatory, Researchers and professionals must work on the security issues associated with
cloud computing. Strong security policies must be designed to ensure data is safe and
prevented from unauthorized access, in both corporate data centers and in the cloud

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 Advanced Computing: An International Journal ( ACIJ ), Vol.4, No.1, January 2013

servers. This research brings primary problems in terms of cloud security, which are alleged to
cloud computing security and privacy issues. Further the study gazes primary security and
privacy Problems. It mainly focuses public clouds that needs significant consideration and
presents required facts and figures to make organizations data security decisions. Key
security issues identified and addressed in this paper are end user trust, Insider Access,
Visibility, Risk Management, Client-Side Protection, Server-Side Protection, Access Control
and Identity management.
The strengths of their work is identification and discussion on cloud computing security
issues which educates end users about security and private risks associated with cloud
services. The weakness is that they haven‘t proposed any tool or framework to address
identifies issues.

Rituik Dubey et al. [15] define different attacks scenarios and propose counter schemes for each.

M. Okuhara et al. [16] explain how customers, despite their deep-seated concerns and
uneasiness about cloud computing, can enjoy the benefits of the cloud without worry if cloud
services providers use appropriate architectures for implementing security measures. They
also describe the security problems that surround cloud computing and outline Fujitsu’s
security architecture for solving them.

[17] takes a detailed look at cloud computing security risks and conclude that, as computing
takes a step forward to cloud computing, security should not move backward. Users should
not accept moving backward in terms of security, and computing technology and security both,
must advance together.

[18] shows that some of the cutting edge technologies for cloud security are: self-protecting
data, trusted monitors, and searchable encryption. With the integration of these technologies
into their solutions, customers will have even more trust in their cloud provider.
[19] discusses the fundamental trusted computing technologies on which latest approaches to
cloud security are based.

[20] argues that, with continued research advances in trusted computing and computation-
supporting encryption, life in the cloud can be advantageous from a business-intelligence stand
point, over the isolated alternative that is more common now a days.

[21] describes Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) physical and operational security processes for
network and infrastructure under Amazon Web Services (AWS) management. It also gives
service specific security implementations for Amazon Web Services (AWS).

3. THREAT MODEL FOR CLOUD

An abstract view of threat model for Cloud computing is shown in Figure. 2. Cloud clients are
facing two types of security threats viz; external and internal attacks.

Figure 2: Threat model for Cloud computing.

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External network attacks in the cloud are increasing at a notable rate. Malicious user outside the
Cloud often performs DoS or DDoS attacks to affect the availability of Cloud services and
resources. Port scanning, IP spoofing, DNS poisoning, phishing are also executed to gain access
of Cloud resources. A malicious user can capture and analyze the data in the packets sent over
this network by packet sniffing. IP spoofing occurs when a malicious user impersonates a
legitimate users IP address where they could access information that they would not have
been able to access otherwise. Availability is very important. Not having access to services
when needed can be a disaster for anyone especially in the case of being denied service. This
can occur when exhaustion of the host servers causes requests from legitimate consumers to be
denied. This can cost a company large amounts of money and time if the services they depend
on to operate are not available.
Internal attacker (authorized user) can easily get access to other user’s resources without being
detected. An insider has higher privileges and knowledge (related to network, security
mechanism and resources to attack) than the external attacker. Therefore, it is easy for an insider
to penetrate an attack than external attackers.

4. VULNERABILITIES TO CLOUD COMPUTING

In Cloud, existing vulnerabilities, threats, and associated attacks raise several security
concerns. Vulnerabilities in Cloud can be defined as the loopholes in the security architecture of
Cloud, which can be exploited by an adversary via sophisticated techniques to gain access to
the network and other infrastructure resources. In this section, we discuss major Cloud
specific vulnerabilities, which pose serious threats to Cloud computing.

4.1 Session Riding and Hijacking

Session hijacking refers to use of a valid session key to gain unauthorized access for the
information or services residing on a computer system, it also refers to theft of a cookie used to
authenticate a user to a remote server and it is relevant to web application technologies
weaknesses in the web application structure at their disposal that gives the chance to hackers in
order to accomplish a wide variety of malicious activities. While session riding refers to the
hackers sending commands to a web application on behalf of the targeted user by just
sending that user an email or tricking the user into visiting a specially crafted website. Session
riding deletes user data, executes online transactions like bids or orders, sends spam to an
intranet system via internet and changes system as well as network configurations or even opens
the firewall [22]. However, the web technologies evolution and refinement also brings new
techniques that compromise sensitive data, provide access to theoretically secure networks and
pose threats to the daily operation of online businesses.

4.2 Reliability and Availability of Service

In terms of reliability and availability, cloud computing is not a perfect technology. For-
example in February 2008, Amazon's Web Service (Amazons-S3) cloud storage infrastructure
went down for several hours, causing data loss and access issues with multiple Web 2.0 services.
With more services being built on top of cloud computing infrastructures, an outage or
failure can create a domino effect by taking down large amounts of Internet based
services and applications which raise several questions such as in cases of failure, what forms of
settlement exist for stakeholders? What is the responsibility of cloud providers? What will be
appropriate procedures to overcome these issues? [23].

4.3 Insecure Cryptography

Attackers’ can decode any cryptographic mechanism or algorithm as main methods to hack
them are discovered. It’s common to find crucial flaws in cryptographic algorithm
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implementations, which can twist strong encryption into weak encryption or sometimes no
encryption at all. For example in cloud virtualization providers uses virtualization software to
partition servers into images that are provided to the users as on-demand services [24].
Although utilization of those VMs into cloud providers' data centres provides more flexible and
efficient setup than traditional servers but they don't have enough access to generate random
numbers needed to properly encrypt data. This is one of the fundamental problems of
cryptography. How do computers produce truly random numbers that can't be guessed or
replicated? In PCs, OS typically monitors users' mouse movements and key strokes to gather
random bits of data that are collected in a so-called Entropy Pool (a set of unpredictable
numbers that encryption software automatically pulls to generate random encryption
passkeys). In servers, one that don't have access to a keyboard or mouse, random numbers are
also pulled from the unpredictable movements of the computer's hard drive. VMs that act as
physical machines but are simulated with software have fewer sources of entropy. For
example Linux-based VMs, gather random numbers only from the exact millisecond time on
their internal clocks and that is not enough to generate strong keys for encryption [25].

4.4 Data Protection and Portability

Although the cloud services are offered based on a contract among client and a provider but what
will happen when the contract is terminated and client doesn’t wants to continue anymore.
The question is, will the sensitive data of client be deleted or misused by the provider. Secondly
if the provider went out of business due to any reason, what will happen to the services and
data of the client? Will the provider handout the data of client to some other provider, if yes,
will client trust the new provider? Considering these questions we can say that data
protection and portability remains as one of main weaknesses of cloud computing.

5. THREATS TO CLOUD COMPUTING

In this section, we discuss threats relevant to the security architecture of Cloud services. We
discuss here some potential threats relevant to Cloud and their remedies based on our experience
of implementing the cloud.[26].

5.1 Changes to business model

Cloud computing changes the way in which IT services are delivered. As servers, storage and
applications are provided by off-site external service providers, organizations need to evaluate the
risks associated with the loss of control over the infrastructure. This is one of the major threats
which hinder the usage of Cloud computing services.
Mitigation: A reliable end-to-end encryption and appropriate trust management scheme can
simplify such a threat to some extent.

5.2 Abusive use of Cloud computing

Cloud computing provides several utilities including bandwidth and storage capacities. Some
vendors also give a predefined trial period to use their services. However, they do not have
sufficient control over the attackers, malicious users or spammers that can take advantages of
the trials. These can often allow an intruder to plant a malicious attack and prove to be a
platform for serious attacks. Areas of concern include password and key cracking, etc. Such
threats affect the IaaS and PaaS service models.
Mitigation: To remediate this, initial registration should be through proper validation/verification
and through stronger authentication. In addition to this, the user’s network traffic should be
monitored comprehensively.

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5.3 Insecure interfaces and API

Cloud providers often publish a set of APIs to allow their customers to design an interface for
interacting with Cloud services. These interfaces often add a layer on top of the framework,
which in turn would increase the complexity of Cloud. Such inter- faces allow vulnerabilities (in
the existing API) to move to the Cloud environment. Improper use of such interfaces would
often pose threats such as clear-text authentication, transmission of content, improper
authorizations, etc. Such type of threat may affect the IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS service models.

Mitigation: This can be avoided by using a proper security model for Cloud provider’s interface
and ensuring strong authentication and access control mechanism with encrypted transmission.

5.4 Malicious insiders

Most of the organizations hide their policies regarding the level of access to employees and their
recruitment procedure for employees. However, using a higher level of access, an employee can
gain access to confidential data and services. Due to lack of transparency in Cloud provider’s
process and procedure, insiders often have the privilege. Insider activities are often bypassed
by a firewall or Intrusion Detection system (IDS) assuming it to be a legal activity. However, a
trusted insider may turn into an adversary. In such a situation, insiders can cause a considerable
effect on Cloud service offerings, for example, malicious insiders can access confidential data
and gain control over the Cloud services with no risk of detection. This type of threat may be
relevant to SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS.

Mitigation: To avoid this risk, more transparency is required in security and management
process including compliance reporting and breach notification.

5.5 Shared technology issues/multi-tenancy nature

In multi-tenant architecture, virtualization is used to offer shared on-demand services. The same
application is shared among different users having access to the virtual machine. However, as
highlighted earlier, vulnerabilities in a hypervisor allow a malicious user to gain access and
control of the legitimate users’ virtual machine. IaaS services are delivered using shared
resources, which may not be designed to provide strong isolation for multi-tenant architectures.
This may affect the overall architecture of Cloud by allowing one tenant to interfere in the other,
and hence affecting its normal operation. This type of threat affects IaaS.

Mitigation: Implementation of SLA for patching, strong authentication, and access control to
administrative tasks are some of the solutions to address this issue.

5.6 Data loss and leakage:

Data may be compromised in many ways. This may include data compromise, deletion, or
modification. Due to the dynamic and shared nature of the Cloud, such threat could prove to be a
major issue leading to data theft. Examples of such threats are lack of authentication,
authorization and audit control, weak encryption algorithms, weak keys, risk of association,
unreliable data center, and lack of disaster recovery. This threat can applicable to SaaS, PaaS,
and IaaS.
Mitigation: Solutions include security of API, data integrity, secure storage for used keys, data
backup, and retention policies.

5.7 Service hijacking

Service hijacking may redirect the client to an illegitimate website. User accounts and service
instances could in turn make a new base for attackers. Phishing attack, fraud, exploitation of
software vulnerabilities, reused credentials, and passwords may pose service or account
hijacking. This threat can affect IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.
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Mitigation: Some of the mitigation strategies to address this threat include security policies,
strong authentication, and activity monitoring.

5.8 Risk profiling

Cloud offerings make organizations less involved with ownership and maintenance of hardware
and software. This offers significant advantages. However, these makes them unaware of internal
security procedures, security compliance, hardening, patching, auditing, and logging process
and expose the organization to greater risk.

Mitigation: To avoid this Cloud provider should disclose partial infrastructure details, logs, and
data. In addition to this, there should also be a monitoring and alerting system.

5.9 Identity theft

Identity theft is a form of fraud in which someone pretends to be someone else, to access
resources or obtain credit and other benefits. The victim (of identity theft) can suffer adverse
consequences and losses and held accountable for the perpetrator’s actions. Relevant security
risks include weak password recovery workflows, phishing attacks, key loggers, etc. This affects
SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS.

Mitigation: The solution is to use strong authentication mechanisms.

6. ATTACKS ON CLOUD COMPUTING

By exploiting vulnerabilities in Cloud, an adversary can launch the following attacks.

6.1 Zombie attack

Through the Internet, an attacker tries to flood the victim by sending requests from innocent
hosts in the network. These types of hosts are called zombies. In the Cloud, the requests for
Virtual Machines (VMs) are accessible by each user through the Internet. An attacker can flood
the large number of requests via zombies. Such an attack interrupts the expected behavior of
Cloud affecting availability of Cloud services. The Cloud may be overloaded to serve a number of
requests, and hence exhausted, which can cause DoS (Denial of Service) or DDoS (distributed
denial of service) to the servers. Cloud in the presence of attacker’s flooded requests cannot serve
valid user’s requests.

Mitigation: However, better authentication and authorization and IDS/IPS can provide
protection against such an attack.

6.2 Service injection attack

Cloud system is responsible for determining and eventually instantiating a free-to- use instance
of the requested service. The address for accessing that new instance is to be communicated
back to the requesting user. An adversary tries to inject a malicious service or new virtual
machine into the Cloud system and can provide malicious service to users. Cloud malware affects
the Cloud services by changing (or blocking) Cloud functionalities. Consider a case wherein an
adversary creates his/her malicious services like SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS and adds it to the Cloud
system. If an adversary succeeds to do this, then valid requests are redirected to the malicious
services automatically.
Mitigation: To defend against this type of attack, service integrity checking module should be
implemented. Strong isolation between VMs may disable the attacker from injecting malicious
code in the neighbor’s VM.

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6.3 Attacks on virtualization

There are mainly two types of attacks performed over virtualization: VM Escape and Rootkit in
hypervisor.

6.3.1 VM Escape
In this type of attack, an attacker’s program running in a VM breaks the isolation layer in order
to run with the hypervisor’s root privileges instead with the VM privileges. This allows an
attacker to interact directly with the hypervisor. Therefore, VM Escape from the isolation is
provided by the virtual layer. By VM Escape, an attacker gets access to the host OS and the
other VMs running on the physical machine.

6.3.2 Rootkit in Hypervisor

VM-based rootkits initiate a hypervisor compromising the existing host OS to a VM. The new
guest OS assumes that it is running as the host OS with the corresponding control over the
resources, however, in reality this host does not exist. Hypervisor also creates a covert channel
to execute unauthorized code into the system. This allows an attacker to control over any VM
running on the host machine and to manipulate the activities on the system.

Mitigation: The threat arising due to VM-Level vulnerabilities can be mitigated by

monitoring through IDS (Instruction Detection System)/IPS (Intrusion Prevention System) and
by implementing firewall.

6.4 Man-in-the Middle attack

If secure socket layer (SSL) is not properly configured, then any attacker is able to access
the data exchange between two parties. In Cloud, an attacker is able to access the data
communication among data centers.
Mitigation: Proper SSL configuration and data communication tests between authorized parties
can be useful to reduce the risk of Man-in-the-Middle attack.

6.5 Metadata spoofing attack

In this type of attack, an adversary modifies or changes the service’s Web Services Description
Language (WSDL) file where descriptions about service instances are stored. If the adversary
succeeds to interrupt service invocation code from WSDL file at delivering time, then this
attack can be possible.

Mitigation: To overcome such an attack, information about services and applications should be
kept in encrypted form. Strong authentication (and authorization) should be enforced for
accessing such critical in- formation.

6.6 Phishing attack

Phishing attacks are well known for manipulating a web link and redirecting a user to a false link
to get sensitive data. In Cloud, it may be possible that an attacker use the cloud service to host a
phishing attack site to hijack accounts and services of other users in the Cloud.

6.7 Backdoor channel attack

It is a passive attack, which allows hackers to gain remote access to the compromised system.
Using backdoor channels, hackers can be able to control victim’s resources and can make it a
zombie for attempting a DDoS attack. It can also be used to disclose the confidential data of the
victim.

Mitigation: Better authentication and isolation between VMs can provide protection against
such attacks.
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7. SECURE CLOUD ARCHITECTURE

As Shown in figure 3, we propose cloud security architecture, which protect organization
against security threats and attacks. The key points for this architecture based on our analysis of
existing security technologies are:

7.1 Single Sign-on (SSO)

Currently, Users are having multiple accounts in various Service Providers with different
usernames accompanied by different password. Therefore the vast majority of network users
tend to use the same password wherever possible, posing inherent security risks. The
inconvenience of multiple authentications not only causes users to lose productivity, but also
imposes more administrative overhead. Enterprises today are seriously considering the use of
Single Sign On (SSO) technology [27] to address the password explosion because they
promise to cut down multiple network and application passwords to one.
To overcome this problem, it is suggested that, to streamline security management and to
implement strong authentication within the cloud, organizations should implement Single Sign-
On for cloud users. This enables user to access multiple applications and services in the
cloud computing environment through a single login, thus enabling strong authentication at the
user level.

7.2 Defence in depth Security Approach

As enterprise networking technology has evolved, so too has enterprise security. What began
simply as setting up a perimeter around the network via fairly basic security tools like firewalls
and email gateways, has evolved into adding an array of virtual private networks (VPNs), virtual
local area network (VLAN) segmentation, authentication, and intrusion detection systems
(IDS)—necessary to handle the consistently growing number of threats to the corporate network.

Virtual firewall appliances should be deployed instead of first-generation firewalls. This allows
network administrators to inspect all levels of traffic, which includes basic web browser traffic,
to peer-to-peer applications traffic and encrypted web traffic in the SSL tunnel .Intrusion
Prevention Systems (IPS) should be installed to protect networks from internal threats from
insiders.

7.3 Increase Availability

Availability is a reoccurring and a growing concern in software intensive systems. Cloud
systems services can be turned offline due to conservation, power outages or possible denial of
service invasions. Fundamentally, its role is to determine the time that the system is up and
running correctly; the length of time between failures and the length of time needed to resume
operation after a failure. Availability needs to be analyzed through the use of presence
information, forecasting usage patterns and dynamic resource scaling [28]. Access to cloud
service should be available all the time, even during maintenance. This makes critical business
data stored in the cloud to be always available to cloud users, reducing network down time,
thereby increasing business profits. This can be done by implementing high availability
technologies such as active/active clustering, dynamic server load balanced and ISP load
balancing within the network infrastructure.

7.4 Data Privacy

Cloud data privacy problem will be found at every stage of the life cycle. For the data
storage and use, Mow bray et al. [29] proposed a client-based privacy management tool that
provides a user-centric trust model to help users control their sensitive information during the
cloud storage and use.
Data loss prevention (DLP) tools can help control migration of data to the cloud and also find
sensitive data leaked to the cloud. Data loss prevention (DLP) is a strategy for making sure that
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end users do not send sensitive or critical information outside of the corporate network. DLP
help a network administrator control what data end users can transfer.

Figure 3: Secure Cloud Architecture.

7.5 Data Integrity

As a result of large scale data communication cost, the users don’t want to download data
but verify its correctness. Therefore, users need to retrieve the little cloud data through
some kinds of agreements or knowledge’s which are the probability of analytical tools with
high confidence level to determine whether the remote data integrity. User can do the
increase and decrease of the data capacity in the cloud server with the help of CSP(cloud service
provider) in his request. This storage level must be with flexible and durability condition as far
as its entire design or structure is concerned. Thus it should be claimed extra storage space
concerning future process in data exchange.

7.6 Virtual Machine Protection

You can't just install your firewall or antivirus software on a cloud-based virtual machine.
Physical firewalls aren't designed to inspect and filter the vast amount of traffic originating from
a hypervisor running 10 virtualized servers. Because VMs can start, stop and move from
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hypervisor to hypervisor at the click of a button, whatever protection you've chosen has to
handle these activities with ease. Plus, as the number of VMs increases in the data center, it
becomes harder to account for, manage and protect them. And if unauthorized people gain
access to the hypervisor, they can take advantage of the lack of controls and modify all the VMs
housed there.
These virtual machines are vulnerable like their physical counterparts. Hence, to adequately
protect virtual machines, t h e y should he isolated from o t h e r network segments and
deep inspection at the network level should be implemented to prevent them both from
internal and external threats. Illegal internal access should be restricted by implementing
intrusion prevention systems and unauthorized external access should be protected by using
secure remote access technologies like IPSec or SSL VPN.

8. CONCLUSION
In this research paper we have discussed the characteristics of a cloud security that contains
threats/attacks and vulnerabilities. Organizations that are implementing cloud computing by
expanding their on-premise infrastructure, should be aware of the security challenges faced by
cloud computing. To protect against the compromise of the compliance integrity and security
of their applications and data, defense in depth approach must be applied. This line of defense
includes firewall, Intrusion detection and prevention, integrity monitoring, log inspection, and
malware protection. Proactive organizations and service providers should apply this protection
on their cloud infrastructure, to achieve security so that they could take advantage of cloud
computing ahead of their competitors. In this paper, a physical cloud computing security
architecture has been presented. In future, the proposed architecture may be modified with
the advancement of security technologies used for implementing this physical cloud
security architecture. By considering the contributions from several IT industries worldwide,
it’s obvious that cloud computing will be one of the leading strategic and innovative
technologies in the near future.

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Authors
Kashif Munir receives his BSc degree in Mathematics and Physics from Islamia
University Bahawalpur in 1999. He received his MSc degree in Information
Technology from University Sains Malaysia in 2001. He also obtained another MS
degree in Software Engineering from University of Malaya, Malaysia in 2005. His
research area was in the field secure network for mobile devices, Cloud and pervasive
computing.
Mr. Kashif was the lecturer at Stamford College, Malaysia. Currently, he is Lecturer
in the Computer Science & Engineering Unit at Hafr Al-Batin Community College\KFUPM, Saudi
Arabia. He is doing his PhD at Malaysian University of Science and Technology, Malaysia.

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Prof. Dr. Sellappan Palaniappan is currently the Acting Provost and the Dean of
School of Science and Engineering at Malaysia University of Science and
Technology (MUST). Prior to joining MUST, he was an Associate Professor at the
Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya.
He holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Information Science from the University of
Pittsburgh and a Master in Computer Science from the University of London.

Dr. Sellappan is a recipient of several Government research grants and has published numerous journals,
conference papers and IT books. He has served as an IT Consultant for several local and international
agencies such as the Asian Development Bank, the United Nations Development Programme, the World
Bank and the Government of Malaysia. He has conducted workshops for companies. He is also an
external examiner/assessor for several public and private universities. He was a member of IEEE (USA),
Chartered Engineering Council (UK) and British Computer Society (UK), and is currently a member of
the Malaysian National Computer Confederation (MNCC).

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