The threats of data security over the Cloud as perceived by experts and university students

Abstract

This research investigates the privacy, confidentiality and integrity of data over the Cloud. It explores different data security concerns over the Cloud as perceived by experts and university students. This topic is significant because of the increasing demand for Cloud services that attracts many people to use it more frequently. Being aware of data security concerns will undoubtedly help users take precautions from unauthorized access up to data theft. The comparison between the views of experts and users of data threats over the Cloud encourages investigators to conduct further research to increase awareness and maximize security measures. This study is based on the assumption that data over the Cloud are secure. This paper reviews the literature that focuses on the experts' findings and interpretations of data security issues and threats over the Cloud. The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) [I] points out seven security threats: abuse and nefarious use of Cloud Computing, insecure Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), malicious insiders, shared technology vulnerabilities, data loss or leakage, account or service hijacking, and unknown risk profile. In addition, experts state different attacks that may occur at any time: DoS attacks, Cloud malware injection, side channels attack, authentication attacks, and Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) cryptographic attack. In this study, completed questionnaires were collected from students of the University of the West of England to examine their perception and awareness of data threats over the Cloud. Both perceptions from experts and students were compared and analyzed to derive conclusions about data security over the Cloud. A number of findings are discovered. As experts prove that data might be compromised over the Cloud, the outcome of this research reveals that users are unaware of these threats. Many users are unaware of the issues they face concerning their data's privacy, confidentiality, and integrity. However, the participants value their data privacy. The results also show that they utilize the Cloud for different purposes and various benefits. As for further research, many ideas are proposed with regard to research settings in terms of size of sample, type and background of population, and the choice of qualitative methodology.