Cloudopsy: An Autopsy of Data Flows in the Cloud

Despite the apparent advantages of cloud computing, the fear of unauthorized exposure of sensitive user data [3,4,8,13] and non-compliance to privacy restrictions impedes its adoption for security-sensitive tasks. For the common setting in which the cloud infrastructure provider and the online service provider are different, end users have to trust the efforts of both of these parties for properly handling their private data as intended. To address this challenge, in this work, we take a step towards elevating the confidence of users for the safety of their cloud-resident data by introducing Cloudopsy, a service with the goal to provide a visual autopsy of the exchange of user data in the cloud premises. Cloudopsy offers a user-friendly interface to the customers of the cloud-hosted services to independently monitor and get a better understanding of the handling of their cloud-resident sensitive data by the third-party cloud-hosted services. While the framework is targeted mostly towards the end users, Cloudopsy provides also the service providers with an additional layer of protection against illegitimate data flows, e.g., inadvertent data leaks, by offering a graphical more meaningful representation of the overall service dependencies and the relationships with third-parties outside the cloud premises, as they derive from the collected audit logs. The novelty of Cloudopsy lies in the fact that it leverages the power of visualization when presenting the final audit information to the end users (and the service providers), which adds significant benefits to the understanding of rich but ever-increasing audit trails. One of the most obvious benefits of the resulting visualization is the ability to better understand ongoing events, detect anomalies, and reduce decision latency, which can be particularly valuable in real-time environments.