  Cloud computing is a new computational paradigm that offers an innovative
business model for organizations to adopt IT without upfront investment.
Despite the potential gains achieved from the cloud computing, the model
security is still questionable which impacts the cloud model adoption. The
security problem becomes more complicated under the cloud model as new
dimensions have entered into the problem scope related to the model
architecture, multi-tenancy, elasticity, and layers dependency stack. In this
paper we introduce a detailed analysis of the cloud security problem. We
investigated the problem from the cloud architecture perspective, the cloud
offered characteristics perspective, the cloud stakeholders' perspective, and
the cloud service delivery models perspective. Based on this analysis we derive
a detailed specification of the cloud security problem and key features that
should be covered by any proposed security solution.
