Table 3 Threats in cloud computing
ID | Threats | Description | Layer |
|---|---|---|---|
T01 | Account or service hijacking | An account theft can be performed by different ways such as social engineering and weak credentials. If an attacker gains access to a user’s credential, he can perform malicious activities such as access sensitive data, manipulate data, and redirect any transaction [16]. | SPI |
T02 | Data scavenging | Since data cannot be completely removed from unless the device is destroyed, attackers may be able to recover this data [10, 17, 25]. | SPI |
T03 | Data leakage | Data leakage happens when the data gets into the wrong hands while it is being transferred, stored, audited or processed [16, 17, 20, 58]. | SPI |
T04 | Denial of Service | It is possible that a malicious user will take all the possible resources. Thus, the system cannot satisfy any request from other legitimate users due to resources being unavailable. | SPI |
T05 | Customer-data manipulation | Users attack web applications by manipulating data sent from their application component to the server’s application [20, 32]. For example, SQL injection, command injection, insecure direct object references, and cross-site scripting. | S |
T06 | VM escape | It is designed to exploit the hypervisor in order to take control of the underlying infrastructure [24, 61]. | I |
T07 | VM hopping | It happens when a VM is able to gain access to another VM (i.e. by exploting some hypervisor vulnerability) [17, 43] | I |
T08 | Malicious VM creation | An attacker who creates a valid account can create a VM image containing malicious code such as a Trojan horse and store it in the provider repository [20]. | I |
T09 | Insecure VM migration | Live migration of virtual machines exposes the contents of the VM state files to the network. An attacker can do the following actions: | I |
a) Access data illegally during migration [42] | |||
b) Transfer a VM to an untrusted host [44] | |||
c) Create and migrate several VM causing disruptions or DoS | |||
T10 | Sniffing/Spoofing virtual networks | A malicious VM can listen to the virtual network or even use ARP spoofing to redirect packets from/to other VMs [45, 51]. | I |