Towards the design of secure and privacy-oriented information systems in the cloud: Identifying the major concepts

Cloud computing is without a doubt one of the most significant innovations presented in the global technological map. This new generation of technology has the potential to positively change our lives since on the one hand it provides capabilities that make our digital lives much easier, than before, while on the other hand it assists developers in creating services that can be disseminated easier and faster, than before, and with significantly less cost. However, one of the major research challenges for the successful deployment of cloud services is a clear understanding of security and privacy issues on a cloud environment, since the cloud architecture has dissimilarities comparing to the traditional distributed systems. Such differences might introduce new threats and require different treatment of security and privacy issues. Nevertheless, current security and privacy requirements engineering techniques and methodologies have not been developed with cloud computing in mind and fail to capture the unique characteristics of such domain. It is therefore important to understand security and privacy within the context of cloud computing and identify relevant security and privacy properties and threats that will support techniques and methodologies aimed to analyze and design secure cloud based systems. The contribution of this paper to the literature is two-fold. Firstly, it provides a clear linkage between a set of critical cloud computing areas with security and privacy threats and properties. Secondly, it introduces a number of requirements for analysis and design methodologies to consider for security and privacy concerns in the cloud.