Category:OWASP Cloud ‐ 10 Project

Goal
According to Gartner, by 2012, 20% of businesses will adopt cloud services and own no IT assets. 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.


 * Most of the risks are based on the assumption that Cloud is a public or a hybrid cloud

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.

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

Other OWASP Cloud-10 Candidates

 * exposure to non-prod and internal environments
 * 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

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

Risk Criteria:


 * 1) Easily Executable
 * 2) Most Damaging
 * 3) Incidence Frequency (Known)

Alpha Release

 * 1) Identify and publish a first draft of potential "OWASP Cloud-10" candidates (Dec 2009)
 * 2) Ask contributors to collect more data and details on each of the risk item. (till Jan 2010)
 * 3) Get initial community feedback by discussing it in various blogs, discussion forums etc. (Jan-Feb 2010)

Beta Release

 * 1) Writeup to be finished by April 5th (All)
 * 2) Provide feedback by April 19th
 * 3) Incorporate all the comments feedback by 26th April
 * 4) Publish the first (beta) list of "OWASP Cloud-10" (April 3rd 2010)
 * 5) Identify additional candidates
 * 6) ……. (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 Pankaj Telang Ken Huang Ove Hansen

Contributors

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