Depleting Clouds A Survey on Security, Privacy, Accountability and Trust Issues in Cloud Computing Piyush Yadav, Gaurav Gupta Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT-Delhi), New Delhi ,India Abstract Today cloud computing offers highly scalable and dynamic services over internet. It provides services to user with more flexibility and less cost. But there are various security concerns on moving these applications to cloud. Lot of the technical security concerns have been raised in recent years like browser security, cloud malware injection attacks and various integrity and binding issues .Various personal and sensitive information of user is in the cloud which make it vulnerable. Privacy is very important in term of legal framework, data governance and user trust. This paper proposes the various security, privacy and trust issues and what the legal methodologies should be drafted and adopted so that these problems can be overcome. Keywords: Security Attacks, Trust, Privacy, Act and Laws, Accountability. 1. Introduction Cloud computing is a hosting service on internet . It can be considered as a super computing model and new trend of delivering computing resources like networks ,servers, data storages and services. Cloud computing is a special form of distributed computing which is been lauded for its agility, flexibility , efficieny and easy set up. Cloud Security Alliance(CSA) defines cloud computing as[45]: “Cloud Computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convinient , on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources.” The evolution of cloud generated services in not too old. It has also came into existence through evolutionary development.The story of cloud computing started from SALESFORCE.COM in 1999 for delivering enterprise applications through website[1].The cloud technology is generated from grid computing. GRID COMPUTING- The technological innovations demand for more computing power as problems were becoming more sophisticated and complex. This given rise to grid computing in mid of 1990. Grid computing was derived from the electrical power grid to emphasize its characteristics like pervasiveness, simplicity and reliability (Foster and Kesselman 1999)[43]. NIST has defined cloud computing model by illustrating five essential charateristics,three cloud service models and four deployment models[45]. These are as follows: Fig 1.2 NIST Cloud Computing Definition A recent survey by Ernst & Young’s Global Information Security Survey 2011 shows that there is an increase use of cloud services by the organisations and it seems that it will increase more in next few months[2]. The analysis of survey is depicted below shows comparison between cloud users in year 2010 and 2011 in form of pie chart- Fig1.1 Evolution of Cloud History Essential Characterist Service Models Deployment Model 2225 International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology (IJERT) Vol. 2 Issue 4, April - 2013 ISSN: 2278-0181 www.ijert.org