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JA6. Future Data Storage Technologies

Statement

You are a cloud security expert who has been hired by a company that is preparing to migrate its operations to the cloud. The company’s management is concerned about the security of their data, especially with the increasing amount of data projected due to the Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data. During your security assessment, you have identified several virtualization security threats that could impact the company’s data and operations if not addressed. As a cloud security expert, you need to choose any one of the following proposed future data storage technologies and explain how it could be a possible solution for the company.

Proposed Future Storage Technology:

  • Option 1: Frozen Data
  • Option 2: Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR)
  • Option 3: DNA Data Storage
  • Option 4: 5D Optical Data Storage
  • Option 5: Helium Drives.

Task

In this assignment, you will choose one proposed future storage technology and write a brief write-up on how it could be a possible solution for the company. You will also explain any three virtualization security threats and suggest countermeasures to mitigate the risks associated with each security threat.

Answer

The need for storage is ever-increasing; every single device across every user is generating data constantly. This data may be valuable to the user (personal data) or the business/entity that the user interacts with (analytics, usage patterns, logs, etc). In all cases, these data must be stored securely and efficiently, and be available when needed. For the company in question, the management is concerned with the capacity of the device and its security. I think that the 5D Optical Data Storage could be a possible solution.

5D Optical Data Storage (5D OSD) is long-lasting, low on energy consumption, and harder to change data once recorded making it a good solution for saving archived data or backups (Wang et al, 2022). The technology uses a femtosecond laser to write data on an array of silica glass, the five dimensions include three traditional spatial dimensions (x, y, z), and two optical dimensions (polarization and intensity). The written optical data has a high chemical and thermal stability and high optical damage threshold thus its lifetime is almost unlimited at room temperature (Wang et al, 2022).

The advantages of 5D OSD include its high capacity, long life, low energy consumption, lack of special storage conditions, ability to work offline, and resistance to physical or optical damage. The disadvantages include high costs, slow write/read speeds, and non-commercial availability. By analyzing the pros and cons, we can see that 5D OSD is a great solution for less accessed large data storage, such as backups, archives, and historical data. Thus, the company may still need another type of storage for frequently accessed data; but its ability to be stored offline increases the security of the data.

Virtualization is an important part of today’s computing landscape; it allows for abstracting a physical machine into logical virtual machines that are independent and isolated from each other. However, things do not always go as planned, and threats like data leakage, VM escape, Rootkit attacks, Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, and Hypervisor attacks are possible. We will explain three of these threats and suggest countermeasures to mitigate the risks associated with each security threat (Chen et al, 2020).

Data leakage is unauthorized access to the data stored on a VM; this may happen during migrations; migrations are common in virtual machines due to the need for moving the VMs to another physical machine for maintenance, load balancing, or scaling up/down. To mitigate this risk, the migration must be planned carefully, data must be encrypted while in transit, and the migration should be rigorously monitored with the option to quickly cancel the migration if any problem is detected.

VM escape is the unauthorized access of a virtual machine to the resources allocated to another virtual machine, hypervisor, or the host machine itself. To mitigate this risk, the security of the hypervisor should be a priority; VMs should be isolated from each other; the hypervisor and the host OS should have full monitoring capabilities over VMs and be able to immediately shut down any VM that tries to escape; and most importantly, all data should be encrypted within the VM.

Denial of service (DoS) attacks happen in virtual machines when a single VM tries to consume all the resources available on the host machine, leaving no resources for other VMs. To mitigate this risk, the hypervisor should have a rigid resource allocation policy that can limit resource consumption when needed; total observability and monitoring overs VMs by the hypervisor are also important.

To conclude, 5D OSD is a great solution for the company’s infrequently accessed large data storage needs, and it has fewer security threats than virtualized storage. There are various threats associated with virtualization but they can be mitigated with careful planning, encryption, continuous monitoring, and the host’s absolute control over the VMs that are running on it.

References

  • Chen, L., Xian, M., Liu, J., & Wang, H. (2020). Research on Virtualization Security in Cloud Computing. IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering, 806(1), 012027–012027. https://doi.org/10.1088/1757-899x/806/1/012027
  • Wang, H., Lei, Y., Wang, L., Masaaki Sakakura, Yu, Y., Gholamreza Shayeganrad, & Kazansky, P. G. (2022). 100‐Layer Error‐Free 5D Optical Data Storage by Ultrafast Laser Nanostructuring in Glass. Laser & Photonics Reviews, 16(4). https://doi.org/10.1002/lpor.202100563

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