A comprehensive meta-analysis of cryptographic security mechanisms for cloud computing

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.The concept of cloud computing offers measurable computational or information resources as a service over the Internet. The major motivation behind the cloud setup is economic benefits, because it assures the reduction in expenditure for operational and infrastructural purposes. To transform it into a reality there are some impediments and hurdles which are required to be tackled, most profound of which are security, privacy and reliability issues. As the user data is revealed to the cloud, it departs the protection-sphere of the data owner. However, this brings partly new security and privacy concerns. This work focuses on these issues related to various cloud services and deployment models by spotlighting their major challenges. While the classical cryptography is an ancient discipline, modern cryptography, which has been mostly developed in the last few decades, is the subject of study which needs to be implemented so as to ensure strong security and privacy mechanisms in today’s real-world scenarios. The technological solutions, short and long term research goals of the cloud security will be described and addressed using various classical cryptographic mechanisms as well as modern ones. This work explores the new directions in cloud computing security, while highlighting the correct selection of these fundamental technologies from cryptographic point of view

Assessing data breach risk in cloud systems

The emerging cloud market introduces a multitude of cloud service providers, making it difficult for consumers to select providers who are likely to be a low risk from a security perspective. Recently, significant emphasis has arisen on the need to specify Service Level Agreements that address security concerns of consumers (referred to as SecSLAs) - these are intended to clarify security support in addition to Quality of Service characteristics associated with services. It has been found that such SecSLAs are not consistent among providers, even though they offer services with similar functionality. However, measuring security service levels and the associated risk plays an important role when choosing a cloud provider. Data breaches have been identified as a high priority threat influencing the adoption of cloud computing. This paper proposes a general analysis framework which can compute risk associated with data breaches based on pre-agreed SecSLAs for different cloud providers. The framework exploits a tree based structure to identify possible attack scenarios that can lead to data breaches in the cloud and a means of assessing the use of potential mitigation strategies to reduce such breaches

SInCom 2015

2nd Baden-Württemberg Center of Applied Research Symposium on Information and Communication Systems, SInCom 2015, 13. November 2015 in Konstan

Virtualization Technology: Cross-VM Cache Side Channel Attacks make it Vulnerable

Cloud computing provides an effective business model for the deployment of IT infrastructure, platform, and software services. Often, facilities are outsourced to cloud providers and this offers the service consumer virtualization technologies without the added cost burden of development. However, virtualization introduces serious threats to service delivery such as Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, Cross-VM Cache Side Channel attacks, Hypervisor Escape and Hyper-jacking. One of the most sophisticated forms of attack is the cross-VM cache side channel attack that exploits shared cache memory between VMs. A cache side channel attack results in side channel data leakage, such as cryptographic keys. Various techniques used by the attackers to launch cache side channel attack are presented, as is a critical analysis of countermeasures against cache side channel attacks

Security Analysis of Web and Embedded Applications

As we put more trust in the computer systems we use the need for securityis increasing. And while security features like HTTPS are becomingcommonplace on the web, securing applications remains dicult. This thesisfocuses on analyzing dierent computer ecosystems to detect vulnerabilitiesand develop countermeasures. This includesweb browsers,web applications,and cyber-physical systems such as Android Automotive.For web browsers, we analyze how new security features might solve aproblem but introduce new ones. We show this by performing a systematicanalysis of the new Content Security Policy (CSP) directive navigate-to.In our research, we nd that it does introduce new vulnerabilities, to whichwe recommend countermeasures. We also create AutoNav, a tool capable ofautomatically suggesting navigation policies for this directive.To improve the security of web applications, we develop a novel blackboxmethod by combining the strengths of dierent black-box methods. Weimplement this in our scanner Black Widow, which we compare with otherleading web application scanners. Black Widow both improves the coverageof the web application and nds more vulnerabilities, including ones inPrestashop, WordPress, and HotCRP.For embedded systems,We analyze the new attack vectors introduced bycombining a phone OS with vehicle APIs and nd new attacks pertaining tosafety, privacy, and availability. Furthermore, we create AutoTame, which isdesigned to analyze third-party apps for vehicles for the vulnerabilities wefound

An Actor-Centric, Asset-Based Monitor Deployment Model for Cloud Computing

Effective monitoring is essential for the security of cloud systems. Although many monitoring tools exist in the cloud domain, there is little guidance on how to deploy monitors to make the most of collected monitor data and increase the likelihood of detecting breaches of security. We introduce an actor-centric, asset-based monitor deployment model for the cloud that enables practitioners to reason about monitor deployment in terms of the security of the cloud assets that they own. We define an actor model that consolidates several roles in the literature to three roles that are motivated by security. We then develop an architectural model that identifies the assets that can be owned by each of those actors, and use it to drive an asset-based cloud threat model. Using our threat model, we claim that a cloud practitioner can reason about monitor deployment to more efficiently deploy monitors and increase its chances of detecting intrusions. We demonstrate the utility of our model with a cloud scenario based on Netflix’s use of Amazon Web Services.Air Force Research Laboratory & Air Force Office of Scientific Research/FA8750-11-2-0084Ope

Comparative Analysis of Data Security and Cloud Storage Models Using NSL KDD Dataset

Cloud computing is becoming increasingly important in many enterprises, and researchers are focusing on safeguarding cloud computing. Due to the extensive variety of service options it offers, A significant amount of interest from the scientific community has been focused on cloud computing. The two biggest problems with cloud computing are security and privacy. The key challenge is maintaining privacy, which expands rapidly with the number of users. A perfect security system must efficiently ensure each security aspect. This study provides a literature review illustrating the security in the cloud with respect to privacy, integrity, confidentiality and availability, and it also provides a comparison table illustrating the differences between various security and storage models with respect to the approaches and components of the models offered. This study also compares Naïve Bayes and SVM on the accuracy, recall and precision metrics using the NSL KDD dataset

Analysing Flow Security Properties in Virtualised Computing Systems

This paper studies the problem of reasoning about flow security properties in virtualised computing networks with mobility from perspective of formal language. We propose a distributed process algebra CSP_{4v} with security labelled processes for the purpose of formal modelling of virtualised computing systems. Specifically, information leakage can come from observations on process executions, communications and from cache side channels in the virtualised environment. We describe a cache flow policy to identify such flows. A type system of the language is presented to enforce the flow policy and control the leakage introduced by observing behaviours of communicating processes and behaviours of virtual machine (VM) instances during accessing shared memory cache

A Language-based Approach to Analysing Flow Security Properties in Virtualised Computing Systems

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