The auditor's guide to ensuring correct security and privacy practices in a cloud computing environment Many organizations are reporting or projecting a significant cost savings through the use of cloud computing—utilizing shared computing resources to provide ubiquitous access for organizations and end users. Just as many organizations, however, are expressing concern with security and privacy issues for their organization's data in the "cloud." Auditing Cloud Computing provides necessary guidance to build a proper audit to ensure operational integrity and customer data protection, among other aspects, are addressed for cloud based resources. Provides necessary guidance to ensure auditors address security and privacy aspects that through a proper audit can provide a specified level of assurance for an organization's resources Reveals effective methods for evaluating the security and privacy practices of cloud services A cloud computing reference for auditors and IT security professionals, as well as those preparing for certification credentials, such as Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) Timely and practical, Auditing Cloud Computing expertly provides information to assist in preparing for an audit addressing cloud computing security and privacy for both businesses and cloud based service providers.

This book mainly focuses on cloud security and high performance computing for cloud auditing. The book discusses emerging challenges and techniques developed for high performance semantic cloud auditing, and presents the state of the art in cloud auditing, computing and security techniques with focus on technical aspects and feasibility of auditing issues in federated cloud computing environments. In summer 2011, the United States Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) CyberBAT Cloud Security and Auditing Team initiated the exploration of the cloud security challenges and future cloud auditing research directions that are covered in this book. This work was supported by the United States government funds from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), the AFOSR Summer Faculty Fellowship Program (SFFP), the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Visiting Faculty Research Program (VFRP), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institute of Health (NIH). All chapters were partially supported by the AFOSR Information Operations and Security Program extramural and intramural funds (AFOSR/RSL Program Manager: Dr. Robert Herklotz). Key Features: · Contains surveys of cyber threats and security issues in cloud computing and presents secure cloud architectures · Presents in-depth cloud auditing techniques, federated cloud security architectures, cloud access control models, and access assured information sharing technologies · Outlines a wide range of challenges and provides solutions to manage and control very large and complex data sets

Many Cloud data auditing algorithms have been proposed to maintain the integrity and privacy of data held in the Cloud. In this book, we present a survey of the state of the art and research of Cloud data auditing techniques with a brief introduction of the basic cloud computing concepts, its architecture and security issues. This book presents an overview of the various methods presently used to perform Cloud data auditing, mostly focusing on integrity and privacy.

This book provides a comprehensive review of the most up to date research related to cloud security auditing and discusses auditing the cloud infrastructure from the structural point of view, while focusing on virtualization-related security properties and consistency between multiple control layers. It presents an off-line automated framework for auditing consistent isolation between virtual networks in OpenStack-managed cloud spanning over overlay and layer 2 by considering both cloud layers’ views. A runtime security auditing framework for the cloud with special focus on the user-level including common access control and authentication mechanisms e.g., RBAC, ABAC and SSO is covered as well. This book also discusses a learning-based proactive security auditing system, which extracts probabilistic dependencies between runtime events and applies such dependencies to proactively audit and prevent security violations resulting from critical events. Finally, this book elaborates the design and implementation of a middleware as a pluggable interface to OpenStack for intercepting and verifying the legitimacy of user requests at runtime. Many companies nowadays leverage cloud services for conducting major business operations (e.g., Web service, inventory management, customer service, etc.). However, the fear of losing control and governance still persists due to the inherent lack of transparency and trust in clouds. The complex design and implementation of cloud infrastructures may cause numerous vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, while the unique properties of clouds (elastic, self-service, multi-tenancy) can bring novel security challenges. In this book, the authors discuss how state-of-the-art security auditing solutions may help increase cloud tenants’ trust in the service providers by providing assurance on the compliance with the applicable laws, regulations, policies, and standards. This book introduces the latest research results on both traditional retroactive auditing and novel (runtime and proactive) auditing techniques to serve different stakeholders in the cloud. This book covers security threats from different cloud abstraction levels and discusses a wide-range of security properties related to cloud-specific standards (e.g., Cloud Control Matrix (CCM) and ISO 27017). It also elaborates on the integration of security auditing solutions into real world cloud management platforms (e.g., OpenStack, Amazon AWS and Google GCP). This book targets industrial scientists, who are working on cloud or security-related topics, as well as security practitioners, administrators, cloud providers and operators.Researchers and advanced-level students studying and working in computer science, practically in cloud security will also be interested in this book.

This cloud audit toolkit is designed to support the work of financial regulators in developing member countries of the Asian Development Bank. It aims to assist and accelerate the uptake of cloud computing technologies and digital tools to improve the efficiency and efficacy of financial regulators' work processes. Drawing on existing practices observed by leading regulators from across the globe, the toolkit provides a comprehensive framework for improving supervisory work processes. It also includes a checklist to help regulators conduct an initial review of their existing oversight mechanisms.

Auditing is constantly and quickly changing due to the continuous evolution of information and communication technologies. As the auditing process is forced to adapt to these changes, issues have arisen that lead to a decrease in the auditing effectiveness and efficiency, leading to a greater dissatisfaction among users. More research is needed to provide effective management and mitigation of the risk associated to organizational transactions and to assign a more reliable and accurate character to the execution of business transactions and processes. Organizational Auditing and Assurance in the Digital Age is an essential reference source that discusses challenges, identifies opportunities, and presents solutions in relation to issues in auditing, information systems auditing, and assurance services and provides best practices for ensuring accountability, accuracy, and transparency. Featuring research on topics such as forensic auditing, financial services, and corporate governance, this book is ideally designed for internal and external auditors, assurance providers, managers, risk managers, academicians, professionals, and students.

"This practical guidance was created for enterprises using or considering using cloud computing. It provides a governance and control framework based on COBIT 5 and an audit program using COBIT 5 for Assurance. This information can assist enterprises in assessing the potential value of cloud investments to determine whether the risk is within the acceptable level. In addition, it provides a list of publications and resources that can help determine if cloud computing is the appropriate solution for the data and processes being considered."--

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security, ACNS 2012, held in Singapore, in June 2012. The 33 revised full papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 192 submissions. They are organized in topical sessions on authentication, key management, block ciphers, identity-based cryptography, cryptographic primitives, cryptanalysis, side channel attacks, network security, Web security, security and privacy in social networks, security and privacy in RFID systems, security and privacy in cloud systems, and security and privacy in smart grids.

You may regard cloud computing as an ideal way for your company to control IT costs, but do you know how private and secure this service really is? Not many people do. With Cloud Security and Privacy, you'll learn what's at stake when you trust your data to the cloud, and what you can do to keep your virtual infrastructure and web applications secure. Ideal for IT staffers, information security and privacy practitioners, business managers, service providers, and investors alike, this book offers you sound advice from three well-known authorities in the tech security world. You'll learn detailed information on cloud computing security that-until now-has been sorely lacking. Review the current state of data security and storage in the cloud, including confidentiality, integrity, and availability Learn about the identity and access management (IAM) practice for authentication, authorization, and auditing of the users accessing cloud services Discover which security management frameworks and standards are relevant for the cloud Understand the privacy aspects you need to consider in the cloud, including how they compare with traditional computing models Learn the importance of audit and compliance functions within the cloud, and the various standards and frameworks to consider Examine security delivered as a service-a different facet of cloud security