Cloud security

Understanding cloud security # In this article, we observe security responsibility of cloud providers: where it ends, what are the gaps and grey areas, and what risks security teams should take into account when using “as a service” platforms. So, you’re planning your new business in an area where security matters, and you start thinking about choosing your cloud provider to build your application on. Typically, you start juggling with a combination of all the nice building blocks you need and financial aspects you’re facing.

Logs, audit logs, and security events are must-have components of a secure system, which help to monitor ongoing behaviour and provide forensic evidence in case of an incident. Let’s cut through complexity. In this article, we cover cryptographically signed audit logging, aka “secure logging”, when logs are generated in a certain way which prevents tampering messages, removing, adding or changing the order of log entries. We explain why signed logs are essential for security software, how we’ve built-in secure audit logging in Acra, and how to use it together with other defense in-depth layers in your systems.

Intro # When companies move their infrastructures into the cloud, provisioning resources and configuring them to emulate their initial infrastructure — a practice called “lift and shift” — or migrate the existing solutions from one platform to another, something inevitably migrates together with all the code and assets: their security assumptions . The security assumptions affect the major security bottleneck — security team’s time and priorities. And the on-premises threat model and security priorities are very different from cloud-based.