Cloud computing paradigm provides a new environment fostering the integration of services located within company boundaries with those in the Cloud. An increasing number of organizations implement their business processes and applications via runtime composition of services made available in the Cloud by external suppliers. This scenario is changing the traditional view of security introducing new service security risks and threats, and requires re-thinking of current assurance, development, testing, and verification methodologies. In particular, security assurance in the cloud is becoming a pressing need to increase the confidence of the cloud actors that the cloud and its services are behaving as expected, and requires novel approaches addressing cloud peculiarities. In addition, the increasing usage of cloud resources as a means to perform big data analytics introduces the need of adapting existing assurance solutions towards big data. On one side, security assurance techniques can benefit from the availability of big data (big data for security assurance), while on the other side they can be applied to verify properties of big data analytics (security assurance for big data). IWSAC 2016 is the fourth edition of the International Workshop on Security Assurance in the Cloud. It aims to address the security assurance issues related to Cloud and Big Data environments, along with evaluating their impact on traditional security solutions for software and network systems.

The workshop seeks submissions from academia and industry presenting novel research on all theoretical and practical aspects of security and assurance of Cloud and Big Data services, as well as experimental studies in Cloud and Big Data infrastructures, the implementation of services, and lessons learned. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Accountability in the cloud
• Authentication and access control in the cloud
• Big Data for security assurance
• Big Data analytics monitoring and testing
• Big Data analytics verification
• Big Data security and privacy
• Challenges in moving critical systems to the cloud
• Cloud audit, certification, and compliance
• Cloud transparency, introspection, and outrospection
• Data security and privacy in the Cloud
• Evidence-based assurance of cloud services
• Information assurance and trust management
• Intrusion detection in the cloud
• Policy compliance
• Security assurance in the cloud
• Security assurance for big data
• Security and assurance protocols in the cloud
• Security and privacy in the cloud
• Service level agreements
• Service procurement in the cloud
• Verification of cloud services