Security Challenges from Abuse of Cloud Service Threat

Cloud computing is an ever-growing technology that leverages dynamic and versatile provision of computational resources and services. In spite of countless benefits that cloud service has to offer, there is always a security concern for new threats and risks. The paper provides a useful introduction to the rising security issues of Abuse of cloud service threat, which has no standard security measures to mitigate its risks and vulnerabilities. The threat can result an unbearable system gridlock and can make cloud services unavailable or even complete shutdown. The study has identified the potential challenges, as BotNet, BotCloud, Shared Technology Vulnerability and Malicious Insiders, from Abuse of cloud service threat. It has further described the attacking methods, impacts and the reasons due to the identified challenges. The study has evaluated the current available solutions and proposed mitigating security controls for the security risks and challenges from Abuse of cloud services threat

Securing Infrastructure-as-a-Service Public Clouds Using Security Onion

The shift to Cloud computing has brought with it its specific security challenges concerning the loss of control, trust and multi-tenancy especially in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Cloud model. This article focuses on the design and development of an intrusion detection system (IDS) that can handle security challenges in IaaS Cloud model using an open source IDS. We have implemented a proof-of-concept prototype on the most deployed hypervisor—VMware ESXi—and performed various real-world cyber-attacks, such as port scanning and denial of service (DoS) attacks to validate the practicality and effectiveness of our proposed IDS architecture. Based on our experimental results we found that our Security Onion-based IDS can provide the required protection in a reasonable and effective manner

A Federated Architecture for Heuristics Packet Filtering in Cloud Networks

The rapid expansion in networking has provided tremendous opportunities to access an unparalleled amount of information. Everyone connects to a network to gain access and to share this information. However when someone connects to a public network, his private network and information becomes vulnerable to hackers and all kinds of security threats. Today, all networks needs to be secured, and one of the best security policies is firewall implementation. Firewalls can be hardware or cloud based. Hardware based firewalls offer the advantage of faster response time, whereas cloud based firewalls are more flexible. In reality the best form of firewall protection is the combination of both hardware and cloud firewall. In this thesis, we implemented and configured a federated architecture using both firewalls, the Cisco ASA 5510 and Vyatta VC6.6 Cloud Based Firewall. Performance evaluation of both firewalls were conducted and analyzed based on two scenarios; spike and endurance test. Throughputs were also compared, along with some mathematical calculations using statistics. Different forms of packets were sent using a specialized tool designed for load testing known as JMeter. After collecting the results and analyzing it thoroughly, this thesis is concluded by presenting a heuristics method on how packet filtering would fall back to the cloud based firewall when the hardware based firewall becomes stressed and over loaded, thus allowing efficient packet flow and optimized performance. The result of this thesis can be used by Information Security Analyst, students, organizations and IT experts to have an idea on how to implement a secured network architecture to protect digital information

A Study of Very Short Intermittent DDoS Attacks on the Performance of Web Services in Clouds

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks for web applications such as e-commerce are increasing in size, scale, and frequency. The emerging elastic cloud computing cannot defend against ever-evolving new types of DDoS attacks, since they exploit various newly discovered network or system vulnerabilities even in the cloud platform, bypassing not only the state-of-the-art defense mechanisms but also the elasticity mechanisms of cloud computing. In this dissertation, we focus on a new type of low-volume DDoS attack, Very Short Intermittent DDoS Attacks, which can hurt the performance of web applications deployed in the cloud via transiently saturating the critical bottleneck resource of the target systems by means of external attack HTTP requests outside the cloud or internal resource contention inside the cloud. We have explored external attacks by modeling the n-tier web applications with queuing network theory and implementing the attacking framework based-on feedback control theory. We have explored internal attacks by investigating and exploiting resource contention and performance interference to locate a target VM (virtual machine) and degrade its performance

SDN-Based Network Intrusion Detection as DDoS defense system for Virtualization Environment

Nowadays, DDoS attacks are often aimed at cloud computing environments, as more people use virtualization servers. With so many Nodes and distributed services, it will be challenging to rely solely on conventional networks to control and monitor intrusions. We design and deploy DDoS attack defense systems in virtualization environments based on Software-defined Networking (SDN) by combining signature-based Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) and sampled flow (sFlow). These techniques are practically tested and evaluated on the Proxmox production Virtualization Environment testbed, adding High Availability capabilities to the Controller. The evaluation results show that it promptly detects several types of DDoS attacks and mitigates their negative impact on network performance. Moreover, it also shows good results on Quality of Service (QoS) parameters such as average packet loss about 0 %, average latency about 0.8 ms, and average bitrate about 860 Mbit/s

Identity management in a public IaaS Cloud

In this thesis the unique environment that is the public IaaS cloud along with its differences from a traditional data center environment has been considered. The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), states that “Managing identities and access control for enterprise applications remains one of the greatest challenges facing IT today”. The CSA also points out that “there is a lack of consistent secure methods for extending identity management into the cloud and across the cloud” [1]. This thesis examines this challenge of managing identities in the cloud by developing a list of best practices for implementing identity management in the cloud. These best practices were then tested by simulated misuse cases which were tested in a prototype of the implementation strategy. The results and analysis of the misuse cases show that the implementation of the identity management solution solves the problem of managing identities for the control of the infrastructure in the cloud. However, the analysis also shows that there are still areas where the properly implemented identity management solution fails to mitigate attacks to the infrastructure. These failures in particular are attacks that are sourced from the subscriber environments in the cloud. Finally, the best practices from this thesis also present some consistent methods for extending identity management into the cloud

Insight from a Docker Container Introspection

Large-scale adoption of virtual containers has stimulated concerns by practitioners and academics about the viability of data acquisition and reliability due to the decreasing window to gather relevant data points. These concerns prompted the idea that introspection tools, which are able to acquire data from a system as it is running, can be utilized as both an early warning system to protect that system and as a data capture system that collects data that would be valuable from a digital forensic perspective. An exploratory case study was conducted utilizing a Docker engine and Prometheus as the introspection tool. The research contribution of this research is two-fold. First, it provides empirical support for the idea that introspection tools can be utilized to ascertain differences between pristine and infected containers. Second, it provides the ground work for future research conducting an analysis of large-scale containerized applications in a virtual cloud

Use Trust Management Framework to Achieve Effective Security Mechanisms in Cloud Environment

Cloud Computing is an Internet based Computing where virtual shared servers provide software, infrastructure, platform and other resources to the customer on pay-as-you-use basis. Cloud Computing is increasingly becoming popular as many enterprise applications and data are moving into cloud platforms. However, with the enormous use of Cloud, the probability of occurring intrusion also increases. There is a major need of bringing security, transparency and reliability in cloud model for client satisfaction. One of the security issues is how to reduce the impact of any type of intrusion in this environment. To address this issue, a security solution is proposed in this paper. We provide a collaborative framework between our Hybrid Intrusion Detection System (Hy-IDS) based on Mobile Agents and virtual firewalls. Therefore, our hybrid intrusion detection system consists of three types of IDS namely IDS-C, IDS-Cr and IDS-M, which are dispatched over three layer of cloud computing. In the first layer, we use IDS-C over our framework to collect, analyze and detect malicious data using Mobile Agents. In case of attack, we collect at the level of the second layer all the malicious data detected in the first layer for the generation of new signatures using IDS-Cr, which is based on a Signature Generation Algorithm (SGA) and network intrusion detection system (NIDS). Finally, through an IDS-M placed in the third layer, the new signatures will be used to update the database NIDS belonging to IDS-Cr, then the database to NIDS belonging of IDS-Cr the cluster neighboring and also their IDS-C. Hardware firewall is unable to control communication between virtual machines on the same hypervisor. Moreover, they are blind to virtual traffic. Mostly, they are deployed at Virtual Machine Monitor- level (VMM) under Cloud provider’s control. Equally, the mobile agents play an important role in this collaboration. They are used in our framework for investigation of hosts, transfer data malicious and transfer update of a database of neighboring IDS in the cloud. With this technique, the neighboring IDS will use these new signatures to protect their area of control against the same type of attack. By this type of close-loop control, the collaborative network security management framework can identify and address new distributed attacks more quickly and effectively