Book excerpt: This book mainly focuses on cloud security and high performance computing for cloud auditing. The book discusses emerging challenges and techniques developed for high performance semantic cloud auditing, and presents the state of the art in cloud auditing, computing and security techniques with focus on technical aspects and feasibility of auditing issues in federated cloud computing environments. In summer 2011, the United States Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) CyberBAT Cloud Security and Auditing Team initiated the exploration of the cloud security challenges and future cloud auditing research directions that are covered in this book. This work was supported by the United States government funds from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), the AFOSR Summer Faculty Fellowship Program (SFFP), the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Visiting Faculty Research Program (VFRP), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institute of Health (NIH). All chapters were partially supported by the AFOSR Information Operations and Security Program extramural and intramural funds (AFOSR/RSL Program Manager: Dr. Robert Herklotz). Key Features: · Contains surveys of cyber threats and security issues in cloud computing and presents secure cloud architectures · Presents in-depth cloud auditing techniques, federated cloud security architectures, cloud access control models, and access assured information sharing technologies · Outlines a wide range of challenges and provides solutions to manage and control very large and complex data sets