What are the Challenges Surrounding Cloud-based Application Security Testing?

 

cloud-based-application-security-testing

The growing complexity of software applications has brought to the fore the utilitarian value of the cloud. It has helped enterprises to avail greater bandwidth access and speed to deliver superior user experiences. Further, the cloud has enabled small and medium enterprises to run operations without investing heavily in creating and maintaining an in-house IT infrastructure. The range of benefits accrued to enterprises by moving to the cloud includes higher productivity and efficiency, flexibility, easy upgrades, anywhere and anytime access, enhanced collaboration, and disaster management and recovery, among others. The cloud-based environment has become highly sought after for enterprises given the myriad challenges surrounding the legacy systems.

With the maturity of virtualization and automation technologies, the cloud has become the preferred go-to medium for enterprises to facilitate computing, storage, testing, deployment, and maintenance of data and applications. However, one area where the cloud generally faces some sort of challenge is security, especially with regard to the public cloud. And with growing spending on public cloud services, by 18.4% in 2021, the security aspect is only going to gain more traction. Going forward, around 94% of the global workload is expected to be controlled by leading cloud computing services (source: way2smile.ae.) This calls for implementing cloud security testing and ensuring the security of your business and customer data on the cloud.

Cloud-based application security testing challenges

Security has been the Achilles heel for some of the cloud platforms and poses certain challenges when it comes to undertaking cloud application security testing.

  • Insufficient Identity, Access, and Key Management: The cloud introduces a host of changes to conventional system management practices concerning Identity and Access Management (IAM). These changes can have a profound impact on the identity, credentials, and access management of the application to be tested on the cloud. In both private and public cloud settings, the cloud service providers and consumers need to manage the identity and access management of applications without impacting security.
  • Distributed Risks: The cloud allows enterprises to utilize its distributed computing capabilities and unlimited resource pool. However, this creates associated security risks as enterprises do not have access to the internal operational architecture of the cloud platforms. The risks include the following:
  • Data segregation: In the shared storage area of the cloud your business data might be stored with others’ data. And should the cloud provider err in ensuring logical isolation of your business data there can be a risk of a data breach.
  • Private information leakage: Threat actors can attack your confidential business and customer data, which may not always be possible to prevent using encryption. Hence, to protect the confidentiality of such data, whether at rest or during transit, enterprises should ensure proper cloud security policies and rules are in place.
  • Loss of service: Hackers may launch Denial of Service (DoS) attacks on the cloud platform leaving it inaccessible to authorized users. Such a situation can be prevented by the built-in high availability architecture of the cloud.
  • Malware attacks: Again, hackers can attack the legitimate cloud instance with a piece of malware. So, should the cloud remain unprotected against horizontal or vertical malware, the impact can be dire for your business.
  • In addition to the above, all security risks related to in-house legacy systems and traditional applications such as command injection, network segmentation, web application attacks, and others are applicable to the cloud as well.
  • On-Demand Services: Cloud is known to offer easily accessible and timely on-demand services to individuals and enterprises. These services can maintain data confidentiality and integration with third-party components. However, while offering on-demand services and tools for integration, cloud providers should ensure security compliance. At the same time, enterprises should share their security requirements and policies with the cloud provider and selectively expose data for cloud security testing.

·     Lack of standardization: The prevalent cloud security testing approach is not universally accepted and approved but depends on the cloud providers’ offerings and the needs of businesses. There may be situations where some enterprises focus on specific aspects of cloud services for testing, which others may not treat as critical. Today, the cloud performance testing approach comprises a wide range of techniques based on the pricing models.

Insecure APIs: Cloud providers let businesses interact with and manage on-demand services using user interfaces and APIs. Thus, the security of such services depends on the security of the APIs. The APIs should be designed in such a way that they can easily deal with activities such as authentication, encryption, access control, and activity monitoring. Further, they should be able to protect against malicious and accidental attempts to breach or circumvent the security protocols. Remember, poorly designed, broken, or exposed APIs are prone to misuse and manipulation by threat actors.

Tips to minimize the impact of security-related challenges

·          To design secure systems for cloud-based services, aspects such as integrity, confidentiality, and availability of cloud application security testing should be considered. The security considerations should include aspects like data-level and network security, back-up, and disaster recovery.

·         It is important to understand the relationships and dependencies between service models and cloud computing deployment to assess risks to security and controls

·         Implement security policies by combining security best practices such as CIS and NIST, among others, to address cloud-based security threats. Besides, enhancing any current security policies should adhere to security certifications and audit requirements

·         Reduce manual testing of workarounds, save time, and minimize overhead costs by maintaining the interoperability of components.

Conclusion

Cloud testing services for security ought to utilize cloud-based resources, be it for small or large organizations. The challenges to testing cloud-based applications notwithstanding, it is important that cloud providers should work towards ensuring cloud-based security for data, applications, and services.

Resource 

James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies. I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality that yields strong results and always happy to create valuable content & share thoughts. 

Article Source: wattpad.com

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