Assessing the security of the cloud environment

Abstract

Nowadays, many organizations find it economically attractive to host their services in a cloud environment. Still, security remains the number one concern for many organizations in adopting the cloud services. In this paper, we assess and study the security of a typical cloud environment as that of the popular Amazon AWS Cloud. The cloud security is assessed by deploying and running Dionaea honeypots for a few months in the cloud provide networks. Collected data and logs from Dionaea honeypots show that the cloud environment is surprisingly insecure and is in fact a target of malicious activities and attacks from different countries.