Towards alignment of architectural domains in security policy specifications

Large organizations need to align the security architecture across three different domains: access control, network layout and physical infrastructure. Security policy specification formalisms are usually dedicated to only one or two of these domains. Consequently, more than one policy has to be maintained, leading to alignment problems. Approaches from the area of model-driven security enable creating graphical models that span all three domains, but these models do not scale well in real-world scenarios with hundreds of applications and thousands of user roles. In this paper, we demonstrate the feasibility of aligning all three domains in a single enforceable security policy expressed in a Prolog-based formalism by using the Law Governed Interaction (LGI) framework. Our approach alleviates the limitations of policy formalisms that are domain-specific while helping to reach scalability by automatic enforcement provided by LGI

A survey of intrusion detection techniques in Cloud

Cloud computing provides scalable, virtualized on-demand services to the end users with greater flexibility and lesser infrastructural investment. These services are provided over the Internet using known networking protocols, standards and formats under the supervision of different managements. Existing bugs and vulnerabilities in underlying technologies and legacy protocols tend to open doors for intrusion. This paper, surveys different intrusions affecting availability, confidentiality and integrity of Cloud resources and services. It examines proposals incorporating Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) in Cloud and discusses various types and techniques of IDS and Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS), and recommends IDS/IPS positioning in Cloud architecture to achieve desired security in the next generation networks

CyberGuarder: a virtualization security assurance architecture for green cloud computing

Cloud Computing, Green Computing, Virtualization, Virtual Security Appliance, Security Isolation

Algorithms for advance bandwidth reservation in media production networks

Media production generally requires many geographically distributed actors (e.g., production houses, broadcasters, advertisers) to exchange huge amounts of raw video and audio data. Traditional distribution techniques, such as dedicated point-to-point optical links, are highly inefficient in terms of installation time and cost. To improve efficiency, shared media production networks that connect all involved actors over a large geographical area, are currently being deployed. The traffic in such networks is often predictable, as the timing and bandwidth requirements of data transfers are generally known hours or even days in advance. As such, the use of advance bandwidth reservation (AR) can greatly increase resource utilization and cost efficiency. In this paper, we propose an Integer Linear Programming formulation of the bandwidth scheduling problem, which takes into account the specific characteristics of media production networks, is presented. Two novel optimization algorithms based on this model are thoroughly evaluated and compared by means of in-depth simulation results

APMEC: An Automated Provisioning Framework for Multi-access Edge Computing

Novel use cases and verticals such as connected cars and human-robot cooperation in the areas of 5G and Tactile Internet can significantly benefit from the flexibility and reduced latency provided by Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC). Existing frameworks managing and orchestrating MEC and NFV are either tightly coupled or completely separated. The former design is inflexible and increases the complexity of one framework. Whereas, the latter leads to inefficient use of computation resources because information are not shared. We introduce APMEC, a dedicated framework for MEC while enabling the collaboration with the management and orchestration (MANO) frameworks for NFV. The new design allows to reuse allocated network services, thus maximizing resource utilization. Measurement results have shown that APMEC can allocate up to 60% more number of network services. Being developed on top of OpenStack, APMEC is an open source project, available for collaboration and facilitating further research activities

GNFC: Towards Network Function Cloudification

An increasing demand is seen from enterprises to host and dynamically manage middlebox services in public clouds in order to leverage the same benefits that network functions provide in traditional, in-house deployments. However, today's public clouds provide only a limited view and programmability for tenants that challenges flexible deployment of transparent, software-defined network functions. Moreover, current virtual network functions can't take full advantage of a virtualized cloud environment, limiting scalability and fault tolerance. In this paper we review and evaluate the current infrastructural limitations imposed by public cloud providers and present the design and implementation of GNFC, a cloud-based Network Function Virtualization (NFV) framework that gives tenants the ability to transparently attach stateless, container-based network functions to their services hosted in public clouds. We evaluate the proposed system over three public cloud providers (Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Engine) and show the effects on end-to-end latency and throughput using various instance types for NFV hosts