DeepSec 2013 Talk: From Misconceptions To Failure – Security And Privacy In The US Cloud Computing FedRAMP Program

René Pfeiffer/ October 16, 2013/ Conference, Security

The „Cloud“ doesn’t stop when it comes to government data. Once government authorities play with outsourcing a lot more regulations need to be reviewed. Mikhail Utin talks about new results and a continuation of his last presentation at DeepSec conference: Our second presentation at DeepSec on so named “Cloud Computing” (CC) and associated services (CCS) considers practical implementation of the “concept” by US government in its FedRAMP program, which is expected to convert all the government IT services into “cloud” based ones. Our first (DeepSec 2012) presentation considered whether such “concept” is useful to protect privacy and implement such regulation as EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) proposal. In fact, we have shown that CC is a misleading terminology, providing a confusing name to describe well-known IT infrastructure, which is little more than a

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All Your Clouds are to Belong to Whom?

René Pfeiffer/ August 5, 2012/ Discussion, Security

There are probably less than 5 persons on this planet who know what cloud computing really means. The figure might be exaggerated, but while enterprises, consultants and vendors try to figure out the best cloud for their business model the attackers already take advantage of cloud infrastructure. Let’s disregard climate dependencies and extraordinary political environments for a moment (if you say yes to cloud computing, then you have this already taken into account and under control, right?). Let’s focus on on the security implications for the moment. There’s an example of a string of unintended consequences by a successful social engineering attack. The target was a „cloud account“ linked to storage and three personal devices (a phone, a tablet and a laptop). The attacker gained access by means of tech support and bypassing security

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Talk: Do They Deliver – Practical Security and Load Testing of Cloud Service Providers

René Pfeiffer/ September 13, 2011/ Conference

No technology has produced more hot air and confusion than All Things Cloud™. This is not meant to be the introduction for yet another rant. It serves to illustrate what happens when you talk about complex infrastructure and use too much simplification. The Cloud infrastructure is no off-the-shelf gadget you can buy by the dozen, (virtually) connect and put on-line. It may be bigger, it may handle more load that your own infrastructure, and it may be more secure. The problem is how do you do find out? What metric tells you this? How do you compare and evaluate? This is where you might need some new tools. Matthias Luft, a security consultant at ERNW, will address this problem in his talk. …To provide a toolset for measuring potential profits for performing this shift,

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