Industrial Espionage: Corporate Data Continues To Leak

A press release from the White House, dated 25 September 2015, states that the USA and China have agreed to collaborate in a number of global challenges. An agreement was reached that the two respective governments will not knowingly support theft of confidential business information. Access to advanced integrated IT infrastructures such as cloud has empowered many businesses economically but unfortunately also made them vulnerable to threats such as the leakage or theft of any confidential information, including business information. The problem is that it is nowadays much easier for confidential information to leak especially when businesses that are in competition with each other, share the same cloud infrastructure. Furthermore, it is difficult for Cloud Service Providers (CSP's) to control the sharing of resources such as competitors sharing the same physical node in a cloud. The key contributions of this paper are the identification of security challenges, requirements for preventing leakage of confidential business information and an approach to show how the physical placement of a business's data in the cloud can be controlled based on conflict-of-interest classes.