Revisiting Cloud Security Threats: Elevation of Privilege

Research study depicts that security needs to be recognized and threat vector in Cloud Computing needs to be focused on. There are numerous threats to cloud security and accordingly, individual threat study must be revised regularly to meet the changing requirements of a highly volatile security environment. These malicious attackers are considerable risk for today’s Cloud Computing. Even a single malicious Cloud user or administrator can eavesdrop or harm business, stored data or Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and computations. Cloud Computing processes mostly need higher privilege accesses in order to operate information systems and to provide services these get affected by threats due to destabilized privilege management. This paper presents a broad indication of a destabilized privilege management factor or threat known as ‘Elevation of Privilege’. A comprehensive survey on the same has been presented. The paper also focuses on various directions for future research in the area of Elevation of Privilege Threat based on the prior published works and industry/organization reports.