Physical Resource Management and Access Mediation Within the Cloud Computing Paradigm

Cloud computing has seen a surge over the past decade as corporations and institutions have sought to leverage the economies-of-scale achievable through this new computing paradigm. However, the rapid adoptions of cloud computing technologies that implement the existing cloud computing paradigm threaten to undermine the long-term utility of the cloud model of computing. In this thesis we address how to accommodate the variety of access requirements and diverse hardware platforms of cloud computing users by developing extensions to the existing cloud computing paradigm that afford consumer-driven access requirements and integration of new physical hardware platforms

A novel intrusion detection system (IDS) architecture. Attack detection based on snort for multistage attack scenarios in a multi-cores environment.

Recent research has indicated that although security systems are developing, illegal intrusion to computers is on the rise. The research conducted here illustrates that improving intrusion detection and prevention methods is fundamental for improving the overall security of systems. This research includes the design of a novel Intrusion Detection System (IDS) which identifies four levels of visibility of attacks. Two major areas of security concern were identified: speed and volume of attacks; and complexity of multistage attacks. Hence, the Multistage Intrusion Detection and Prevention System (MIDaPS) that is designed here is made of two fundamental elements: a multistage attack engine that heavily depends on attack trees and a Denial of Service Engine. MIDaPS were tested and found to improve current intrusion detection and processing performances. After an intensive literature review, over 25 GB of data was collected on honeynets. This was then used to analyse the complexity of attacks in a series of experiments. Statistical and analytic methods were used to design the novel MIDaPS. Key findings indicate that an attack needs to be protected at 4 different levels. Hence, MIDaPS is built with 4 levels of protection. As, recent attack vectors use legitimate actions, MIDaPS uses a novel approach of attack trees to trace the attacker¿s actions. MIDaPS was tested and results suggest an improvement to current system performance by 84% whilst detecting DDOS attacks within 10 minutes

Automating DDoS Experimentation

Abstract — While the DETER testbed provides a safe environment and basic tools for security experimentation, researchers face a significant challenge in assembling the testbed pieces and tools into realistic and complete experimental scenarios. In this paper, we describe our work on automating experimentation for distributed denial-ofservice attacks. We developed the following automation tools: (1) the Experimenter’s Workbench that provides a graphical user interface, tools for topology, traffic and monitoring setup and tools for statistics collection, visualization and processing, (2) a DDoS benchmark suite that contains a set of diverse and comprehensive attack scenarios, (3) the Experiment Generator that combines chosen AS-level and edge-level topologies, legitimate traffic and a set of attacks into DETER-compatible scripts. Jointly, these tools facilitate easy experimentation even for novice users. I