3,537 research outputs found
Cloud Security : A Review of Recent Threats and Solution Models
The most significant barrier to the wide adoption of cloud services has been attributed to perceived cloud insecurity (Smitha, Anna and Dan, 2012). In an attempt to review this subject, this paper will explore some of the major security threats to the cloud and the security models employed in tackling them. Access control violations, message integrity violations, data leakages, inability to guarantee complete data deletion, code injection, malwares and lack of expertise in cloud technology rank the major threats. The European Union invested €3m in City University London to research into the certification of Cloud security services. This and more recent developments are significant in addressing increasing public concerns regarding the confidentiality, integrity and privacy of data held in cloud environments. Some of the current cloud security models adopted in addressing cloud security threats were – Encryption of all data at storage and during transmission. The Cisco IronPort S-Series web security appliance was among security solutions to solve cloud access control issues. 2-factor Authentication with RSA SecurID and close monitoring appeared to be the most popular solutions to authentication and access control issues in the cloud. Database Active Monitoring, File Active Monitoring, URL Filters and Data Loss Prevention were solutions for detecting and preventing unauthorised data migration into and within clouds. There is yet no guarantee for a complete deletion of data by cloud providers on client requests however; FADE may be a solution (Yang et al., 2012)
Automatic Software Repair: a Bibliography
This article presents a survey on automatic software repair. Automatic
software repair consists of automatically finding a solution to software bugs
without human intervention. This article considers all kinds of repairs. First,
it discusses behavioral repair where test suites, contracts, models, and
crashing inputs are taken as oracle. Second, it discusses state repair, also
known as runtime repair or runtime recovery, with techniques such as checkpoint
and restart, reconfiguration, and invariant restoration. The uniqueness of this
article is that it spans the research communities that contribute to this body
of knowledge: software engineering, dependability, operating systems,
programming languages, and security. It provides a novel and structured
overview of the diversity of bug oracles and repair operators used in the
literature
KASR: A Reliable and Practical Approach to Attack Surface Reduction of Commodity OS Kernels
Commodity OS kernels have broad attack surfaces due to the large code base
and the numerous features such as device drivers. For a real-world use case
(e.g., an Apache Server), many kernel services are unused and only a small
amount of kernel code is used. Within the used code, a certain part is invoked
only at runtime while the rest are executed at startup and/or shutdown phases
in the kernel's lifetime run. In this paper, we propose a reliable and
practical system, named KASR, which transparently reduces attack surfaces of
commodity OS kernels at runtime without requiring their source code. The KASR
system, residing in a trusted hypervisor, achieves the attack surface reduction
through a two-step approach: (1) reliably depriving unused code of executable
permissions, and (2) transparently segmenting used code and selectively
activating them. We implement a prototype of KASR on Xen-4.8.2 hypervisor and
evaluate its security effectiveness on Linux kernel-4.4.0-87-generic. Our
evaluation shows that KASR reduces the kernel attack surface by 64% and trims
off 40% of CVE vulnerabilities. Besides, KASR successfully detects and blocks
all 6 real-world kernel rootkits. We measure its performance overhead with
three benchmark tools (i.e., SPECINT, httperf and bonnie++). The experimental
results indicate that KASR imposes less than 1% performance overhead (compared
to an unmodified Xen hypervisor) on all the benchmarks.Comment: The work has been accepted at the 21st International Symposium on
Research in Attacks, Intrusions, and Defenses 201
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