Survey of Cloud Computing Security - 605.731

The promise of significant cost savings and inherent flexibility of resources are an impetus for the adoption of cloud computing by many organizations. Cloud computing also introduces privacy and security risks that are not traditionally present in a siloed data center. This course focuses on these security concerns and countermeasures for a cloud environment. An overview of cloud computing and virtualization, the critical technology underpinning cloud computing, provides the necessary background for these threats. Additional topics vary but may include access control, identity management, denial of service, account and service hijacking, secure APIs, malware, forensics, regulatory compliance, trustworthy computing, and secure computing in the cloud. This course follows a seminar-style format where students are expected to lead class discussions and write a publication-quality paper as part of a course project.