Category:OWASP Cloud ‐ 10 Project

Goal
Goal of the project is to maintain a list of top 10 security risks faced with the Cloud Computing and SaaS Models. List will be maintained by input from community, security experts and security incidences at cloud/SaaS providers.

Audience
Audience for the project will be organizations planning on leveraging external cloud environment to host their applications or rent application in a SaaS model (Software as a Service). Aim of the "OWASP Cloud-10" list is to help balance security risks with the cost advantage that the Cloud and SaaS model provides. We expect the Cloud and SaaS providers to be indirect audience for "OWASP Cloud-10", when they try to showcase their security controls to potential customers against this list.

Managing OWASP Cloud-10 List (Pre-Alpha)
“OWASP Cloud-10” list will be maintained by input from, community, security experts and security incidences at cloud/SaaS providers.

Each of the identified risk in "OWASP Cloud-10" will provide details on:


 * Various Risk Scenarios
 * Real World Examples
 * Possible Mitigations and Security Controls
 * Reference to any related Incident

Initial pre-alpha list of OWASP Cloud Top 10 Security Risks
 Table 1: Top 10 Cloud - Security Risks 

Other OWASP Cloud-10 Candidates

 * Service Availability Risk
 * Multi-Tenancy
 * Integration between cloud and internally hosted services
 * Patching and Vulnerability Management
 * Lack of Transparency in Internal Security Controls and difficulty/complexity of auditing
 * Enterprise Intranets exposed directly on Internet (if they move on a Public Cloud)

This needs to be debated and for each of these we may need to add a separate page-holder with the following details.


 * Various Risk Scenarios
 * Real World Examples
 * Possible Mitigation and Security Controls
 * Reference to any related Incident

Alpha State
Approach:

Criteria: a) Easily Executable b) Most Damaging c) Incidence Frequency (Known)

Top 10

Normalize Verbiage Describe


 * 1) Identify and publish a first draft of potential "OWASP Cloud-10" candidates (July 2009)
 * 2) Ask contributors to collect more data and details on each of the risk item. (till Aug 2009)
 * 3) Get initial community feedback by discussing it in various blogs, discussion forums etc. (till Aug-Sept 2009)

Beta State

 * 1) Publish the first (beta) list of "OWASP Cloud-10" (Oct 2009)
 * 2) Identify additional candidates
 * 3) ……. (repeat steps as in Alpha)

Related Efforts

 * 1) Cloud Security Alliance - http://www.cloudsecurityalliance.org/
 * 2) IDC Aug 2008 Survey (Security #1) Challenge for Cloud/On-Demand Models - http://blogs.idc.com/ie/?p=210

Related OWASP Projects

 * 1) OWASP Top Ten Project
 * 2) OWASP Legal Project

Project Leaders
Vinay Bansal Shankar Babu Chebrolu Martin G. Nystrom Jim Born

Ken Huang

Contributors

 * 1) Subscribe or read the Cloud-10 mail archives