Security Attacks and Solutions in Clouds Kazi Zunnurhain and Susan V. Vrbsky Department of Computer Science The University of Alabama Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0290 kzunnurhain@crimson.ua.edu, vrbsky@cs.ua.edu Abstract— Cloud computing offers great potential to improve productivity and reduce costs, but at the same time it possesses many new security risks. In this paper we identify the possible security attacks on clouds including: Wrapping attacks, Malware-Injection attacks, Flooding attacks, Browser attacks, and also Accountability checking problems. We identify the root causes of these attacks and propose specific solutions. Keywords- FAT table; hypervisor; security attack I. INTRODUCTION In the field of computation, there have been many approaches for enhancing the parallelism and distribution of resources for the advancement and acceleration of data utilization. data clusters, distributed database management systems, data grids, and many more mechanisms have been introduced. Now cloud computing is emerging as the mechanism for high level computation, as well as serving as a storage system for resources. Clouds allow users to pay for whatever resources they use, allowing users to increase or decrease the amount of resources requested as needed. Cloud servers can be used to motivate the initiation of a business and ease its financial burden in terms of Capital Expenditure and Operational Expenditure. There are many questions that arise as to whether a cloud is secure enough. Considering malicious intruders, there are many kinds of possible attacks, such as a Wrapping attack, Malware-Injection attack, Flooding attack and Browser attack. A Wrapping attack is done by duplication of the user account and password in the log-in phase so that the SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) messages that are exchanged during the setup phase between the Web browser and server are affected by the attackers. In a Malware- Injection attack, the attacker creates a normal operation, such as deleteUser, and embeds in it another command, such as setAdminRight. So, when the user request is passed to the server, rather than the server executing the command as if it were deleting a user account, it actually discloses a user account to the attacker. A Flooding attack occurs when an attacker generates bogus data, which could be resource requests or some type of code to be run in the application of a legitimate user, engaging the server’s CPU, memory and all other devices to compute the malware requests. The servers finally end up reaching their maximum capacity, and thereby offload to another server, which results in flooding. A Browser attack is committed by sabotaging the signature and encryption during the translation of SOAP messages in between the web browser and web server, causing the browser to consider an adversary as a legitimate user and process all requests communicating with web server. In addition, if any kind of failure occurs, it is not clear who is the responsible party. A failure can occur for various reasons: 1) due to hardware, which is in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) layer of the cloud; 2) due to malware in software, which is in the Software as a Service (SaaS) layer of the cloud; or 3) due to the customer’s application running some kind of malicious code, the malfunctioning of the customer’s applications or a third party invading a client’s application by injecting bogus data. Whatever the reason, a failure can result in a dispute between the provider and the clients. From the client point of view, data loss or interruption in computation can cost financially as well as affect a business reputation. From the provider point of view, the quality of service (QoS) is hampered, the Service Level Agreement (SLA) is not being satisfied and there can be unnecessary charges to the customers for which the customer is not responsible. These are all costly, affecting the provider’s business reputation. Considering the above issues, one of the main focuses of cloud computing is its security. In this paper, we identify some prime security issues in cloud computation, try to identify the root cause of the failures and propose some solutions. Our observations in this paper will be specific to each issue rather than imposing security as a whole. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In the next section we describe some related work. In Section III some security issues and the root causes are elaborated upon, followed by some approaches to solve these problems. Finally the conclusion is presented with thoughts for our future work and improvements in Section IV.