Keywords
lifecycle policy risk
residual data exposure
cloud vulnerability assessment
policy-aware risk scoring
temporary URL exposure
cloud data governance
Abstract
Cloud object storage is commonly used for application data, archives, logs, backups, analytics outputs, and cross-service data exchange. Although access control is important, data-security risk may also arise from improper lifecycle policies, residual objects, unexpired temporary files, vulnerable processing services, and inconsistent deletion rules. This study proposes a policy-aware vulnerability risk assessment framework for object storage lifecycle and residual data exposure in cloud platforms. The framework evaluates object sensitivity, lifecycle rule completeness, deletion-policy compliance, bucket vulnerability context, temporary URL exposure, processing-service privileges, replication settings, and retention violations. A lifecycle-risk propagation model is used to connect vulnerable processing workloads with generated storage objects and retained data copies. Experiments are conducted on a cloud storage environment containing 38,500 buckets, 126 million object metadata records, 4,760 lifecycle rules, 21,300 temporary access URLs, 7,900 data-processing services, and 31,200 vulnerability records linked to storage-facing workloads. The proposed method identifies 4,180 residual data exposure chains, including expired temporary files, replicated sensitive objects without aligned deletion rules, vulnerable processors writing to public-facing buckets, and long-lived temporary URLs linked to regulated datasets. It consolidates 31,200 vulnerability findings into 4,640 lifecycle-aware remediation units. The storage-policy engine scans 126 million object records in 41.3 minutes and completes daily incremental analysis in 6.8 minutes. After two remediation batches, residual sensitive-object cases decrease by 2.31 million records, and long-lived temporary URLs linked to sensitive data decrease from 3,420 to 870. The median scoring time is 24 ms per bucket-level risk unit. These findings indicate that lifecycle-aware vulnerability assessment can uncover data-security risks that are missed by access-control-only cloud storage reviews.
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