AmazonIA: when elasticity snaps back

Cloud Computing is an emerging technology promising new business opportunities and easy deployment of web services. Much has been written about the risks and benefits of cloud computing in the last years. The literature on clouds often points out security and privacy challenges as the main obstacles, and proposes solutions and guidelines to avoid them. However, most of these works deal with either malicious cloud providers or customers, but ignore the severe threats caused by unaware users. In this paper we consider security and privacy aspects of real-life cloud deployments, independently from malicious cloud providers or customers. We focus on the popular Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and give a detailed and systematic analysis of various crucial vulnerabilities in publicly available and widely used Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) and show how to eliminate them. Our Amazon Image Attacks (AmazonIA) deploy an automated tool that uses only publicly available interfaces and makes no ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: CCS
• Authors: Sven Bugiel, Stefan Nürnberger, Thomas Pöppelmann, Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, Thomas Schneider 0003
• Keywords: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, CCS 2011, Passwords Keys, Privacy Challenges, Security Privacy