Security, Privacy, and Digital Forensics in the Cloud

1Introduction to the Cloud and Fundamental Security and Privacy Issues of the Cloud

Hassan Takabi¹ and Mohammad GhasemiGol²

¹Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA

²Department of Computer Engineering, University of Birjand, Birjand, Iran

1.1 Introduction

Cloud computing is the most popular paradigm in the computer world that provides on‐demand computing and storage capabilities to consumers over the Internet. However, these benefits may result in serious security issues such as data breaches, computation breaches, flooding attacks, etc. On the other hand, the whole IT infrastructure is under the control of the cloud provider, and cloud consumers have to trust the security‐protection mechanisms that are offered by service providers. Therefore, security concerns should be considered to improve the assurance of required security for cloud customers.

The key security constructs in the cloud environment are information, identity, and infrastructure. Cloud information flows into the physical infrastructure from many users across different devices and geographies. The objective of information security is to protect information as well as information systems from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification, or destruction (Winkler 2011). In other words, at the heart of any information security system is the requirement to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data. It is important to thoroughly ...