Self-healing Multi-Cloud Application Modelling

Cloud computing market forecasts and technology trends confirm that Cloud is an IT disrupting phenomena and that the number of companies with multi-cloud strategy is continuously growing. Cost optimization and increased competitiveness of companies that exploit multi-cloud will only be possible when they are able to leverage multiple cloud offerings, while mastering both the complexity of multiple cloud provider management and the protection against the higher exposure to attacks that multi-cloud brings. This paper presents the MUSA Security modelling language for multi-cloud applications which is based on the Cloud Application Modelling and Execution Language (CAMEL) to overcome the lack of expressiveness of state-of-the-art modelling languages towards easing: a) the automation of distributed deployment, b) the computation of composite Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that include security and privacy aspects, and c) the risk analysis and service match-making taking into account not only functionality and business aspects of the cloud services, but also security aspects. The paper includes the description of the MUSA Modeller as the Web tool supporting the modelling with the MUSA modelling language. The paper introduces also the MUSA SecDevOps framework in which the MUSA Modeller is integrated and with which the MUSA Modeller will be validated.The MUSA project leading to this paper has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation pro- gramme under grant agreement No 644429

Survivor: A Fine-Grained Intrusion Response and Recovery Approach for Commodity Operating Systems

International audienceDespite the deployment of preventive security mechanisms to protect the assets and computing platforms of users, intrusions eventually occur. We propose a novel intrusion survivability approach to withstand ongoing intrusions. Our approach relies on an orchestration of fine-grained recovery and per-service responses (e.g., privileges removal). Such an approach may put the system into a degraded mode. This degraded mode prevents attackers to reinfect the system or to achieve their goals if they managed to reinfect it. It maintains the availability of core functions while waiting forpatches to be deployed. We devised a cost-sensitive response selection process to ensure that while the service is in a degraded mode, its core functions are still operating. We built a Linux-based prototype and evaluated the effectiveness of our approach against different types of intrusions. The results show that our solution removes the effects of the intrusions, that it can select appropriate responses, and that it allows services to survive when reinfected. In terms of performance overhead, in most cases, we observed a small overhead, except in the rare case of services that write many small files asynchronously in a burst, where we observed a higher but acceptable overhead