Technical Report on Deploying a highly secured OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure using BradStack as a Case Study

Cloud computing has emerged as a popular paradigm and an attractive model for providing a reliable distributed computing model.it is increasing attracting huge attention both in academic research and industrial initiatives. Cloud deployments are paramount for institution and organizations of all scales. The availability of a flexible, free open source cloud platform designed with no propriety software and the ability of its integration with legacy systems and third-party applications are fundamental. Open stack is a free and opensource software released under the terms of Apache license with a fragmented and distributed architecture making it highly flexible. This project was initiated and aimed at designing a secured cloud infrastructure called BradStack, which is built on OpenStack in the Computing Laboratory at the University of Bradford. In this report, we present and discuss the steps required in deploying a secured BradStack Multi-node cloud infrastructure and conducting Penetration testing on OpenStack Services to validate the effectiveness of the security controls on the BradStack platform. This report serves as a practical guideline, focusing on security and practical infrastructure related issues. It also serves as a reference for institutions looking at the possibilities of implementing a secured cloud solution.Comment: 38 pages, 19 figures

Addressing the Node Discovery Problem in Fog Computing

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has gained a lot of attention due to connecting various sensor devices with the cloud, in order to enable smart applications such as: smart traffic management, smart houses, and smart grids, among others. Due to the growing popularity of the IoT, the number of Internet-connected devices has increased significantly. As a result, these devices generate a huge amount of network traffic which may lead to bottlenecks, and eventually increase the communication latency with the cloud. To cope with such issues, a new computing paradigm has emerged, namely: fog computing. Fog computing enables computing that spans from the cloud to the edge of the network in order to distribute the computations of the IoT data, and to reduce the communication latency. However, fog computing is still in its infancy, and there are still related open problems. In this paper, we focus on the node discovery problem, i.e., how to add new compute nodes to a fog computing system. Moreover, we discuss how addressing this problem can have a positive impact on various aspects of fog computing, such as fault tolerance, resource heterogeneity, proximity awareness, and scalability. Finally, based on the experimental results that we produce by simulating various distributed compute nodes, we show how addressing the node discovery problem can improve the fault tolerance of a fog computing system