Security in the cloud

If you use a cloud-based service, you should be just as worried as some companies who “are wary of handing data to third parties, fearing hacking, accidental data loss, or theft by rogue employees of cloud providers.” But where there is a problem, there is always an opportunity for some bright minds to propose a solution and make some money in the process.

New security solutions are appearing: One verifies cloud providers’ claims that your data is safely lodged on its own server. Another protects your cloud-based data by using a math function to divide it into 16 segments, any 10 of which can be used to re-create the entire original set.

The first of these solutions responds to recent demonstrations that hacking within clouds—using one set of rented computers or “virtual machines” to attack another—is theoretically possible. In 2009, computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego and MIT showed how an attacker using Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud could land on the same physical server as his intended victim.

(In one method, they forced a hypothetical victim to hire more virtual machines by bombarding his website with traffic and then created attacking virtual machines at the same time. This put the two sets of machines on the same cloud server 40 percent of the time.)

Read the complete article here.