ABSTRACT Information Flow Auditing In the Cloud

VMware have become the top-tier cloud services players, public cloud services have turned mainstream for individual users. Many companies and even governments are also adopting cloud services as a solution to reduce costs and improve the quality of their services. How-ever, despite the appealing benefits of cloud technologies, inherent in the concept of cloud computing are also the risks associated with entrusting confidential and sensitive data to third parties, especially in the case of security-sensitive operations, i.e., banking, medical services. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the most-often cited barriers against cloud computing are cloud users ’ lack of trust regarding data confidentiality as well as the risk of unauthorized exposure and manipulation of sensitive user data within the cloud, since such incidents cause catastrophic damages to the business interests of an organization, as well as affect the privacy individuals are entitled to. Most cloud providers and service providers (e.g., Amazon, Google, Dropbox etc.) do take security precautions for protecting users ’ data and use service level agreements (SLAs) as a means to promise, among other features, availability, reliability and compliance with privacy standards (e.g., HIPPA, PCI-DCS, FISMA etc.). But very limited tools are cur