Evaluating cloud deployment scenarios based on security and privacy requirements

Migrating organisational services, data and application on the Cloud is an important strategic decision for organisations due to the large number of benefits introduced by the usage of cloud computing, such as cost reduction and on demand resources. Despite, however, of the many benefits, there are challenges and risks for cloud adaption related to (amongst others) data leakage, insecure APIs, and shared technology vulnerabilities. These challenges need to be understood and analysed in the context of an organisation relevant cloud computing deployment models. Although, the literature provides a large number of references to works that consider cloud computing security issues, no work has been provided, to our knowledge, which supports the elicitation of security and privacy requirements and the selection of an appropriate cloud deployment model based on such requirements. This work contributes towards this gap. In particular, we propose a requirements engineering framework to support the elicitation of security and privacy requirements and the selection of an appropriate deployment model based on the elicited requirements. Our framework provides a modelling language that builds on concepts from requirements, security, privacy and cloud engineering and a systematic process. We use a real case study, based on the Greek National Gazette, to demonstrate the applicability of our work

Advanced Cloud Privacy Threat Modeling

Privacy-preservation for sensitive data has become a challenging issue in cloud computing. Threat modeling as a part of requirements engineering in secure software development provides a structured approach for identifying attacks and proposing countermeasures against the exploitation of vulnerabilities in a system . This paper describes an extension of Cloud Privacy Threat Modeling (CPTM) methodology for privacy threat modeling in relation to processing sensitive data in cloud computing environments. It describes the modeling methodology that involved applying Method Engineering to specify characteristics of a cloud privacy threat modeling methodology, different steps in the proposed methodology and corresponding products. We believe that the extended methodology facilitates the application of a privacy-preserving cloud software development approach from requirements engineering to design

Authentication and authorisation in entrusted unions

This paper reports on the status of a project whose aim is to implement and demonstrate in a real-life environment an integrated eAuthentication and eAuthorisation framework to enable trusted collaborations and delivery of services across different organisational/governmental jurisdictions. This aim will be achieved by designing a framework with assurance of claims, trust indicators, policy enforcement mechanisms and processing under encryption to address the security and confidentiality requirements of large distributed infrastructures. The framework supports collaborative secure distributed storage, secure data processing and management in both the cloud and offline scenarios and is intended to be deployed and tested in two pilot studies in two different domains, viz, Bio-security incident management and Ambient Assisted Living (eHealth). Interim results in terms of security requirements, privacy preserving authentication, and authorisation are reported

Secure Cloud-Edge Deployments, with Trust

Assessing the security level of IoT applications to be deployed to heterogeneous Cloud-Edge infrastructures operated by different providers is a non-trivial task. In this article, we present a methodology that permits to express security requirements for IoT applications, as well as infrastructure security capabilities, in a simple and declarative manner, and to automatically obtain an explainable assessment of the security level of the possible application deployments. The methodology also considers the impact of trust relations among different stakeholders using or managing Cloud-Edge infrastructures. A lifelike example is used to showcase the prototyped implementation of the methodology

Service Level Agreement-based GDPR Compliance and Security assurance in (multi)Cloud-based systems

Compliance with the new European General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679) and security assurance are currently two major challenges of Cloud-based systems. GDPR compliance implies both privacy and security mechanisms definition, enforcement and control, including evidence collection. This paper presents a novel DevOps framework aimed at supporting Cloud consumers in designing, deploying and operating (multi)Cloud systems that include the necessary privacy and security controls for ensuring transparency to end-users, third parties in service provision (if any) and law enforcement authorities. The framework relies on the risk-driven specification at design time of privacy and security level objectives in the system Service Level Agreement (SLA) and in their continuous monitoring and enforcement at runtime.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 644429 and No 780351, MUSA project and ENACT project, respectively. We would also like to acknowledge all the members of the MUSA Consortium and ENACT Consortium for their valuable help