On the Security of Public Cloud Storage

The broadly accepted and undisputed economic benefits notwithstanding, cloud computing, and particularly cloud storage, raises many security-related and legal qualms: Every enterprise considering to utilize cloud storage has to deal with compliance and security restrictions. In order to address these, cloud providers offer more and more security mechanisms for their services. At closer inspection, however, such mechanisms often are of limited value. In order to assess the security of existing cloud storage services, we build a generic usage model for public cloud storage integrating perspectives from the law and from economic agency theory as well as a respective basic threat model. Using these models, we then examine selected security mechanisms of two well-known public cloud storage services—Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage—and briefly sketch auspicious starting points for future research.