IaaS Cloud Security

In the last few years, cloud computing has grown from being a promising business concept to one of the fastest growing segments of the IT industry. Now, recession-hit companies are increasingly realizing that simply by tapping into the cloud they can gain fast access to best-of-breed business applications or drastically boost their infrastructure resources, all at negligible cost. Securing our digital assets has become increasingly challenging as our reliance on rapidly evolving technologies continues to grow. The security perimeter in computing has changed from a well-defined boundary that was relatively easy to identify and defend, to an elastic boundary that is constantly changing and for which the threats are constantly evolving. This paper investigates the complex security challenges that are introduced by the trend towards Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)-based cloud computing. Availability, Authenticity, and Privacy are essential concerns for both Cloud providers and consumers as well. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) serves as the foundation layer for the other delivery models, and a lack of security in this layer will certainly affect the other delivery models, i.e., PaaS, and SaaS that are built upon IaaS layer. This paper presents an elaborated study of IaaS components´ security and determines vulnerabilities and countermeasures. Finally, as a result of this research, we propose a Security Model for IaaS (SMI) to guide security assessment and enhancement in IaaS layer.