A Secure and LightWeight Approach for Critical Data Security in Cloud

Abstract — Cloud computing is a model that provides ubiquitous, on demand access to a shared pool of computing resources including networks, servers, storage, application and services that can be easily provisioned and released. As Cloud is a shared and distributed environment, the need for ensuring security of its critical infrastructure that includes computing, network and storage is immense. One of the critical resources to look after in cloud environment is the data which is stored in files. The files can be configuration file at servers, or private user confidential files at users own work space but they all have a risk of data modification associated with them. If user data is modified through an attack then it will decline the trust of user on cloud services and if the important configuration files are modified, they will disrupt the functioning of cloud environment, like attacker can escalate its privileges and access to critical resources through such tampering and modifications to important files. The paper solves the problem addressed and focuses on a proposal and prototype implementation of a tool built for Cloud File integrity establishment and monitoring that establishes and checks file Integrity periodically. The novelty of the approach lies in the fact that the tool does not require any database for storing the integrity of files and the integrity of the file is the compressed encrypted hash of the data stored in the file that can't be reverse engineered by an attacker easily. The tool is lightweight and initial results dictate that it is scalable and efficient. The Real time deployment and analysis of tool is under progress

A Fingerprinting System Calls Approach for Intrusion Detection in a Cloud Environment

Abstract — Cloud Computing envisioned as the next generation architecture for IT enterprises, has proliferated itself due to the advantages it provides. Cloud Computing provides solutions for carrying out efficient, scalable and low cost computing. Due to the distributed nature of cloud based system, it is vulnerable to a large category of attacks out of which VM based attacks are most common. To counter these attacks we need Intrusion Detection System (IDS), which is used to monitor network traffic and policy violations from unauthorized users. Anomaly Detection is a technique of Intrusion Detection, which is used to detect intrusions by monitoring system activity and finding out patterns that do not comply with the normal behavior. In this paper an approach for anomaly detection in cloud environment is presented, which is based upon analysis of system call sequences generated by the virtual machines to the hypervisor. Our proposed implementation prevents malicious VM users to modify well known frequently executed programs