Secure Cloud Infrastructure: A Survey on Issues, Current Solutions, and Open Challenges

Yara Alghofaili,Noura Alrajeh,Bander Ali Saleh Al-Rimy,Murad A Rassam,Albatul Albattah

doi:10.3390/app11199005

Yara Alghofaili, Noura Alrajeh + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/app11199005

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Abstract

Cloud computing is currently becoming a well-known buzzword in which business titans, such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, among others, are at the forefront in developing and providing sophisticated cloud computing systems to their users in a cost-effective manner. Security is the biggest concern for cloud computing and is a major obstacle to users adopting cloud computing systems. Maintaining the security of cloud computing is important, especially for the infrastructure. Several research works have been conducted in the cloud infrastructure security area; however, some gaps have not been completely addressed, while new challenges continue to arise. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the security issues at different cloud infrastructure levels (e.g., application, network, host, and data). It investigates the most prominent issues that may affect the cloud computing business model with regard to infrastructure. It further discusses the current solutions proposed in the literature to mitigate the different security issues at each level. To assist in solving the issues, the challenges that are still unsolved are summarized. Based on the exploration of the current challenges, some cloud features such as flexibility, elasticity and the multi-tenancy are found to pose new challenges at each infrastructure level. More specifically, the multi-tenancy is found to have the most impact at all infrastructure levels, as it can lead to several security problems such as unavailability, abuse, data loss and privacy breach. This survey concludes by giving some recommendations for future research.

Highlights

The idea behind cloud computing is to provide all possible facilities such as software, IT infrastructure, and services to its customers for use over the internet
This study showed that elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is fast and more effective for data protection in a cloud computing environment and reduces computing power and improves performance
The results show that the framework decreases the risk associated with the Virtual machine (VM) running upon this suspected hypervisor

Summary

Introduction

The idea behind cloud computing is to provide all possible facilities such as software, IT infrastructure, and services to its customers for use over the internet. Cloud computing systems are large-scale, heterogeneous collections of autonomous systems and flexible computational architecture This technology is emerging, as it is considered the first choice for businesses that do not want to deal with the in-house maintenance of systems and a development team [1]. Due to the high importance of investigating such issues, this paper conducted an extensive survey on the issues that the cloud computing infrastructure faces at different levels (application, host, network, and data level). It presents the existing solutions used to mitigate these issues. The following are the main contributions of this study: 1. Conducting a systematic evaluation of 103 articles on cloud infrastructure in connection with attacks and defenses

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