Although the cloud computing model is considered to be a very promising internet-based computing platform, it results in a loss of security control over the cloud-hosted assets. This is due to the outsourcing of enterprise IT assets hosted on third-party cloud computing platforms. Moreover, the lack of security constraints in the Service Level Agreements between the cloud providers and consumers results in a loss of trust as well. Obtaining a security certificate such as ISO 27000 or NIST-FISMA would help cloud providers improve consumers trust in their cloud platforms' security. However, such standards are still far from covering the full complexity of the cloud computing model. We introduce a new cloud security management framework based on aligning the FISMA standard to fit with the cloud computing model, enabling cloud providers and consumers to be security certified. Our framework is based on improving collaboration between cloud providers, service providers and service consumers in managing the security of the cloud platform and the hosted services. It is built on top of a number of security standards that assist in automating the security management process. We have developed a proof of concept of our framework using .NET and deployed it on a testbed cloud platform. We evaluated the framework by managing the security of a multitenant SaaS application exemplar.

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Multi-tenancy helps service providers to save costs, improve resource utilization, and reduce service customization and maintenance time by sharing of resources and services. On the other hand, supporting multi-tenancy adds more complexity to the shared application's required capabilities. Security is a key requirement that must be addressed when engineering new SaaS applications or when re-engineering existing applications to support multi-tenancy. Traditional security (re)engineering approaches do not fit with the multitenancy application model where tenants and their security requirements emerge after the system was first developed. Enabling, runtime, adaptable and tenant-oriented application security customization on single service instance is a key challenging security goal in multi-tenant application engineering. In this paper we introduce TOSSMA, a Tenant-Oriented SaaS Security Management Architecture. TOSSMA allows service providers to enable their tenants in defining, customizing and enforcing their security requirements without having to go back to application developers for maintenance or security customizations. TOSSMA supports security management for both new and existing systems. Service providers are not required to write security integration code to use a specific security platform or mechanism. In this paper, we describe details of our approach and architecture, our prototype implementation of TOSSMA, give a usage example of securing a multi-tenant SaaS, and discuss our evaluation experiments of TOSSMA.

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