Exploitation of Vulnerabilities in Cloud-Storage

The paper presents the vulnerabilities of cloud storage and various possible attacks exploiting these vulnerabilities that relate to cloud security, which is one of the challenging features of cloud computing. The attacks are classified into three broad categories of which the social networking based attacks are the recent attacks which are evolving out of existing technologies such as P2P file sharing. The study is extended to available defence mechanisms and current research areas of cloud storage. Based on the study, simple cloud storage is implemented and the major aspects such as login mechanism, encryption techniques and key management techniques are evaluated against the presented attacks. The study proves that the cloud storage consumers are still dependent on the trust and contracts agreed with the service provider and there is no hard way of proven defense mechanisms against the attacks. Further down, the emerging technologies could possibly break down all key based encryption mechanisms. Keywords-cloud storage; security; architecture; vulnerabilities