User Privacy Issues in Eucalyptus: A Private Cloud Computing Environment

The highly scalable nature of Cloud Computing enables its users to utilize distributed computational resources and access large amounts of data using different interfaces. Cloud entities including cloud users, service providers and business partners share the available resources at different levels of technological operations. However, the Cloud Computing framework is inherently susceptible to a great number of security threats due to the amalgamation of different computing technologies that make it a complex architecture. Among all the potential threats, those targeting the users´ data are significantly important and must be thwarted in precedence to facilitate effective cloud functionality. This paper focuses on the potential threats to users´ cloud resident data and metadata and suggests possible solutions to prevent these threats. We have used UEC (Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud) Eucalyptus, which is a popular open source cloud computing software, widely used by the research community. In this work, we have simulated some of the potential attacks to users´ data and metadata stored in Eucalyptus database files in order to provide the intended reader with the requisite information to be able to anticipate the grave consequences of violation of cloud users´ data privacy.