7,181 research outputs found
Security Reputation Metrics
Security reputation metrics (aka. security metrics) quantify the security
levels of organization (e.g., hosting or Internet access providers) relative to
comparable entities. They enable benchmarking and are essential tools for
decision and policy-making in security, and may be used to govern and steer
responsible parties towards investing in security when economic or other
decision-making factors may drive them to do otherwise
On Evaluating Commercial Cloud Services: A Systematic Review
Background: Cloud Computing is increasingly booming in industry with many
competing providers and services. Accordingly, evaluation of commercial Cloud
services is necessary. However, the existing evaluation studies are relatively
chaotic. There exists tremendous confusion and gap between practices and theory
about Cloud services evaluation. Aim: To facilitate relieving the
aforementioned chaos, this work aims to synthesize the existing evaluation
implementations to outline the state-of-the-practice and also identify research
opportunities in Cloud services evaluation. Method: Based on a conceptual
evaluation model comprising six steps, the Systematic Literature Review (SLR)
method was employed to collect relevant evidence to investigate the Cloud
services evaluation step by step. Results: This SLR identified 82 relevant
evaluation studies. The overall data collected from these studies essentially
represent the current practical landscape of implementing Cloud services
evaluation, and in turn can be reused to facilitate future evaluation work.
Conclusions: Evaluation of commercial Cloud services has become a world-wide
research topic. Some of the findings of this SLR identify several research gaps
in the area of Cloud services evaluation (e.g., the Elasticity and Security
evaluation of commercial Cloud services could be a long-term challenge), while
some other findings suggest the trend of applying commercial Cloud services
(e.g., compared with PaaS, IaaS seems more suitable for customers and is
particularly important in industry). This SLR study itself also confirms some
previous experiences and reveals new Evidence-Based Software Engineering (EBSE)
lessons
A Macroscopic Study of Network Security Threats at the Organizational Level.
Defenders of today's network are confronted with a large number of malicious activities such as spam, malware, and denial-of-service attacks. Although many studies have been performed on how to mitigate security threats, the interaction between attackers and defenders is like a game of Whac-a-Mole, in which the security community is chasing after attackers rather than helping defenders to build systematic defensive solutions. As a complement to these studies that focus on attackers or end hosts, this thesis studies security threats from the perspective of the organization, the central authority that manages and defends a group of end hosts. This perspective provides a balanced position to understand security problems and to deploy and evaluate defensive solutions.
This thesis explores how a macroscopic view of network security from an organization's perspective can be formed to help measure, understand, and mitigate security threats. To realize this goal, we bring together a broad collection of reputation blacklists. We first measure the properties of the malicious sources identified by these blacklists and their impact on an organization. We then aggregate the malicious sources to Internet organizations and characterize the maliciousness of organizations and their evolution over a period of two and half years. Next, we aim to understand the cause of different maliciousness levels in different organizations. By examining the relationship between eight security mismanagement symptoms and the maliciousness of organizations, we find a strong positive correlation between mismanagement and maliciousness. Lastly, motivated by the observation that there are organizations that have a significant fraction of their IP addresses involved in malicious activities, we evaluate the tradeoff of one type of mitigation solution at the organization level --- network takedowns.PhDComputer Science and EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116714/1/jingzj_1.pd
SAMI: Service-Based Arbitrated Multi-Tier Infrastructure for Mobile Cloud Computing
Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is the state-ofthe- art mobile computing
technology aims to alleviate resource poverty of mobile devices. Recently,
several approaches and techniques have been proposed to augment mobile devices
by leveraging cloud computing. However, long-WAN latency and trust are still
two major issues in MCC that hinder its vision. In this paper, we analyze MCC
and discuss its issues. We leverage Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to
propose an arbitrated multi-tier infrastructure model named SAMI for MCC. Our
architecture consists of three major layers, namely SOA, arbitrator, and
infrastructure. The main strength of this architecture is in its multi-tier
infrastructure layer which leverages infrastructures from three main sources of
Clouds, Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), and MNOs' authorized dealers. On top
of the infrastructure layer, an arbitrator layer is designed to classify
Services and allocate them the suitable resources based on several metrics such
as resource requirement, latency and security. Utilizing SAMI facilitate
development and deployment of service-based platform-neutral mobile
applications.Comment: 6 full pages, accepted for publication in IEEE MobiCC'12 conference,
MobiCC 2012:IEEE Workshop on Mobile Cloud Computing, Beijing, Chin
Next Generation Cloud Computing: New Trends and Research Directions
The landscape of cloud computing has significantly changed over the last
decade. Not only have more providers and service offerings crowded the space,
but also cloud infrastructure that was traditionally limited to single provider
data centers is now evolving. In this paper, we firstly discuss the changing
cloud infrastructure and consider the use of infrastructure from multiple
providers and the benefit of decentralising computing away from data centers.
These trends have resulted in the need for a variety of new computing
architectures that will be offered by future cloud infrastructure. These
architectures are anticipated to impact areas, such as connecting people and
devices, data-intensive computing, the service space and self-learning systems.
Finally, we lay out a roadmap of challenges that will need to be addressed for
realising the potential of next generation cloud systems.Comment: Accepted to Future Generation Computer Systems, 07 September 201
Herding Vulnerable Cats: A Statistical Approach to Disentangle Joint Responsibility for Web Security in Shared Hosting
Hosting providers play a key role in fighting web compromise, but their
ability to prevent abuse is constrained by the security practices of their own
customers. {\em Shared} hosting, offers a unique perspective since customers
operate under restricted privileges and providers retain more control over
configurations. We present the first empirical analysis of the distribution of
web security features and software patching practices in shared hosting
providers, the influence of providers on these security practices, and their
impact on web compromise rates. We construct provider-level features on the
global market for shared hosting -- containing 1,259 providers -- by gathering
indicators from 442,684 domains. Exploratory factor analysis of 15 indicators
identifies four main latent factors that capture security efforts: content
security, webmaster security, web infrastructure security and web application
security. We confirm, via a fixed-effect regression model, that providers exert
significant influence over the latter two factors, which are both related to
the software stack in their hosting environment. Finally, by means of GLM
regression analysis of these factors on phishing and malware abuse, we show
that the four security and software patching factors explain between 10\% and
19\% of the variance in abuse at providers, after controlling for size. For
web-application security for instance, we found that when a provider moves from
the bottom 10\% to the best-performing 10\%, it would experience 4 times fewer
phishing incidents. We show that providers have influence over patch
levels--even higher in the stack, where CMSes can run as client-side
software--and that this influence is tied to a substantial reduction in abuse
levels
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