Survey on Security Issues in Cloud Computing and Associated Mitigation Techniques

Cloud Computing holds the potential to eliminate the requirements for setting up of high-cost computing infrastructure for IT-based solutions and services that the industry uses. It promises to provide a flexible IT architecture, accessible through internet for lightweight portable devices. This would allow multi-fold increase in the capacity or capabilities of the existing and new software. In a cloud computing environment, the entire data reside over a set of networked resources, enabling the data to be accessed through virtual machines. Since these data-centers may lie in any corner of the world beyond the reach and control of users, there are multifarious security and privacy challenges that need to be understood and taken care of. Also, one can never deny the possibility of a server breakdown that has been witnessed, rather quite often in the recent times. There are various issues that need to be dealt with respect to security and privacy in a cloud computing scenario. This extensive survey paper aims to elaborate and analyze the numerous unresolved issues threatening the cloud computing adoption and diffusion affecting the various stake-holders linked to it.Comment: 20 pages, 2 Figures, 1 Table. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1109.538

Framework for Security Transparency in Cloud Computing

The migration of sensitive data and applications from the on-premise data centre to a cloud environment increases cyber risks to users, mainly because the cloud environment is managed and maintained by a third-party. In particular, the partial surrender of sensitive data and application to a cloud environment creates numerous concerns that are related to a lack of security transparency. Security transparency involves the disclosure of information by cloud service providers about the security measures being put in place to protect assets and meet the expectations of customers. It establishes trust in service relationship between cloud service providers and customers, and without evidence of continuous transparency, trust and confidence are affected and are likely to hinder extensive usage of cloud services. Also, insufficient security transparency is considered as an added level of risk and increases the difficulty of demonstrating conformance to customer requirements and ensuring that the cloud service providers adequately implement security obligations. The research community have acknowledged the pressing need to address security transparency concerns, and although technical aspects for ensuring security and privacy have been researched widely, the focus on security transparency is still scarce. The relatively few literature mostly approach the issue of security transparency from cloud providers’ perspective, while other works have contributed feasible techniques for comparison and selection of cloud service providers using metrics such as transparency and trustworthiness. However, there is still a shortage of research that focuses on improving security transparency from cloud users’ point of view. In particular, there is still a gap in the literature that (i) dissects security transparency from the lens of conceptual knowledge up to implementation from organizational and technical perspectives and; (ii) support continuous transparency by enabling the vetting and probing of cloud service providers’ conformity to specific customer requirements. The significant growth in moving business to the cloud – due to its scalability and perceived effectiveness – underlines the dire need for research in this area. This thesis presents a framework that comprises the core conceptual elements that constitute security transparency in cloud computing. It contributes to the knowledge domain of security transparency in cloud computing by proposing the following. Firstly, the research analyses the basics of cloud security transparency by exploring the notion and foundational concepts that constitute security transparency. Secondly, it proposes a framework which integrates various concepts from requirement engineering domain and an accompanying process that could be followed to implement the framework. The framework and its process provide an essential set of conceptual ideas, activities and steps that can be followed at an organizational level to attain security transparency, which are based on the principles of industry standards and best practices. Thirdly, for ensuring continuous transparency, the thesis proposes an essential tool that supports the collection and assessment of evidence from cloud providers, including the establishment of remedial actions for redressing deficiencies in cloud provider practices. The tool serves as a supplementary component of the proposed framework that enables continuous inspection of how predefined customer requirements are being satisfied. The thesis also validates the proposed security transparency framework and tool in terms of validity, applicability, adaptability, and acceptability using two different case studies. Feedbacks are collected from stakeholders and analysed using essential criteria such as ease of use, relevance, usability, etc. The result of the analysis illustrates the validity and acceptability of both the framework and tool in enhancing security transparency in a real-world environment

Management And Security Of Multi-Cloud Applications

Single cloud management platform technology has reached maturity and is quite successful in information technology applications. Enterprises and application service providers are increasingly adopting a multi-cloud strategy to reduce the risk of cloud service provider lock-in and cloud blackouts and, at the same time, get the benefits like competitive pricing, the flexibility of resource provisioning and better points of presence. Another class of applications that are getting cloud service providers increasingly interested in is the carriers\u27 virtualized network services. However, virtualized carrier services require high levels of availability and performance and impose stringent requirements on cloud services. They necessitate the use of multi-cloud management and innovative techniques for placement and performance management. We consider two classes of distributed applications – the virtual network services and the next generation of healthcare – that would benefit immensely from deployment over multiple clouds. This thesis deals with the design and development of new processes and algorithms to enable these classes of applications. We have evolved a method for optimization of multi-cloud platforms that will pave the way for obtaining optimized placement for both classes of services. The approach that we have followed for placement itself is predictive cost optimized latency controlled virtual resource placement for both types of applications. To improve the availability of virtual network services, we have made innovative use of the machine and deep learning for developing a framework for fault detection and localization. Finally, to secure patient data flowing through the wide expanse of sensors, cloud hierarchy, virtualized network, and visualization domain, we have evolved hierarchical autoencoder models for data in motion between the IoT domain and the multi-cloud domain and within the multi-cloud hierarchy

Strategies for Reducing the Risk of Data Breach Within the Internet Cloud

Businesses are increasingly incorporating cloud computing into their current business models. With this increase, security breach exposure has also increased, causing business leaders to be concerned with financial hardship, operational disruption, customer turnover, and customer confidence loss due to personal data exposure. Grounded in the integrated system theory of information security management, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore successful strategies some information security leaders in the aerospace and defense contractor industry use to protect cloud-based data from security breaches. The participants were 7 information security leaders from 7 different aerospace and defense contractor companies located in the United States mid-Atlantic region. Data from semistructured interviews were analyzed and compared with 8 publicly available data sources for data triangulation. Emergent themes narrowing this knowledge gap was extracted through an analysis technique such as coding and then triangulated. The recurring themes were (a) strong authentication methods, (b) encryption, and (c) personnel training and awareness. A key recommendation includes information security leaders implementing preventative security measures while improving an organization\u27s ability to protect data lost within the Internet cloud. The implications for positive social change include the potential to increase consumers confidence while protecting confidential consumer data and organizational resources, protecting customers from the costs, lost time, and recovery efforts associated with identity theft

A secure and intelligent framework for vehicle health monitoring exploiting big-data analytics

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by IEEE in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems on 04/01/2022. Available online: https://doi.org/10.1109/TITS.2021.3138255 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.The dependency on vehicles is increasing tremendously due to its excellent transport capacity, fast, efficient, flexible, pleasant journey, minimal physical effort, and substantial economic impact. As a result, the demand for smart and intelligent feature enhancement is growing and becoming a prime concern for maximum productivity based on the current perspective. In this case, the Internet of Everything (IoE) is an emerging concept that can play an essential role in the automotive industry by integrating the stakeholders, process, data, and things via networked connections. But the unavailability of intelligent features leads to negligence about proper maintenance of vehicle vulnerable parts, reckless driving and severe accident, lack of instructive driving, and improper decision, which incurred extra expenses for maintenance besides hindering national economic growth. For this, we proposed a conceptual framework for a central VHMS exploiting IoE-driven Multi-Layer Heterogeneous Networks (HetNet) and a machine learning technique to oversee individual vehicle health conditions, notify the respective owner driver real-timely and store the information for further necessary action. This article transparently portrayed an overview of central VHMS and proposed the taxonomy to achieve such an objective. Subsequently, we unveiled the framework for central VHMS, IoE-driven Multi-tire HetNet, with a secure and trustworthy data collection and analytics system. Finally, anticipating this proposition’s outcome is immense in the automotive sector. It may motivate the researcher to develop a central intelligent and secure vehicular condition diagnostic system to move this sector towards Industry 4.0.The authors would like to thank University Malaysia Pahang for providing the laboratory facilities and financial support under the University FLAGSHIP Research Grants (Project number RDU192203), International Matching Grant (No. RDU192704), and Postgraduate Research Scheme Grant (No. PGRS200325)

Explainable AI over the Internet of Things (IoT): Overview, State-of-the-Art and Future Directions

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is transforming the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) by enhancing the trust of end-users in machines. As the number of connected devices keeps on growing, the Internet of Things (IoT) market needs to be trustworthy for the end-users. However, existing literature still lacks a systematic and comprehensive survey work on the use of XAI for IoT. To bridge this lacking, in this paper, we address the XAI frameworks with a focus on their characteristics and support for IoT. We illustrate the widely-used XAI services for IoT applications, such as security enhancement, Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), Industrial IoT (IIoT), and Internet of City Things (IoCT). We also suggest the implementation choice of XAI models over IoT systems in these applications with appropriate examples and summarize the key inferences for future works. Moreover, we present the cutting-edge development in edge XAI structures and the support of sixth-generation (6G) communication services for IoT applications, along with key inferences. In a nutshell, this paper constitutes the first holistic compilation on the development of XAI-based frameworks tailored for the demands of future IoT use cases.Comment: 29 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables. IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society (2022

Emerging Informatics

The book on emerging informatics brings together the new concepts and applications that will help define and outline problem solving methods and features in designing business and human systems. It covers international aspects of information systems design in which many relevant technologies are introduced for the welfare of human and business systems. This initiative can be viewed as an emergent area of informatics that helps better conceptualise and design new world-class solutions. The book provides four flexible sections that accommodate total of fourteen chapters. The section specifies learning contexts in emerging fields. Each chapter presents a clear basis through the problem conception and its applicable technological solutions. I hope this will help further exploration of knowledge in the informatics discipline

Optimization of the methodology of configuration of mobile communication networks

The mobile communication network has been growing quickly, and the mobile network maintenance is becoming more complex, in performance, network coverage, energy, time consuming and expensive. The telecommunication service provider and mobile network telecommunication operator worries to what is the better methodology to optimizing a mobile network configuration and to improve the most efficient operation and functionality, to increase a superior performance in technical aspect (Create, and integrate new network planning in hardware and software level), economic aspect (cost reduction in maintenance) and environmental aspect (use of renewable energy through solar panels or wind power system). The work developed in this dissertation aims to propose an optimization of methodology of configuration of mobile communication network and build an automated configuration system in different technology (GSM, UMTS and LTE) to provide a good quality and improvement in its architecture to meet the requirement for a large number of services or application through distinct means transmission and using technology appropriate with a new generation of hardware to reach certain area in a Base Station Transmition (BTS) and a Radio Network Controller (RNC) that permit configure and integrated hardware and software issues in distinct networks technology (GSM, UMTS and LTE).A rede de comunicação móvel tem crescido rapidamente e ficando cada vez mais complexa, sendo cada vez mais complicado melhorar o desempenho, a cobertura, a eficiência energética e ao mesmo tempo aumentar o numero de utilizadores e serviços. O provedor de serviços de telecomunicações e a operadora de rede móvel têm de se preocupar em optimizar de forma a garantir a melhor configuração de rede móvel tendo em vista melhorar a operação e funcionalidade, a fim de esta ser mais eficiente, no seu desempenho. Relativamente aos aspectos técnicos (Criar novo planeamento e integrar a uma rede ao nível hardware e de software), aspecto econômico (redução de custo na manutenção) e aspecto ambiental (uso de energia renovável, quer através de painéis solares como de sistemas eólicos). O trabalho desenvolvido nesta dissertação visa propor uma otimização da metodologia de configuração das redes de comunicação móveis e construir um sistema de configuração automatizado em diferentes tecnologias (GSM, UMTS e LTE), para garantir os mais altos padrões de qualidade e atender a exigência de um grande número de serviços ou aplicações através de diferentes meios de transmissão e uso de tecnologia apropriada com uma nova geração de hardware para atingir determinada área em uma Estação de Transmissão de Base (BTS) e numa Rede de Controlador de Rádio (RNC) que permitem configurar e integrar diversos tipos de hardware e software em tecnologia de diferentes redes (GSM, UMTS e LTE)