An Hybrid Text-Image Based Authentication for Cloud Services

The problem of securing access to the online information is acute today when access to bank accounts, health records, intellectual property and business or politically sensitive information are made by only a few clicks, regardless of geographic location. At the same time, more and more of these accesses are made from handsets. Cloud Computing is eminently suitable for addressing problems related to limited client resources, as it offloads computation from clients and offers dynamic provisioning of compute resources. Authentication of the companys users to the cloud service is mandatory because in this way it is eliminated the attacks risks to enter into the Cloud services. A suitable authentication is required for organizations that want to access the Cloud services. Our solution regards increasing security at the Security Access Point level of Cloud Computing and it is in fact a strong hybrid user authentication solution based on using image combined with text in order to avoid the weakness of simple user and password solution for authentication. A two factor password image based authentication method is proposed in this paper for cloud services. This authentication approach is used without additional hardware involved and presents the advantages of utilization in terms of security and usability. Every time when the user will be asked to provide his/her identity, a form for each image included in the photo will be listed. The user will have to remember the secret code for each image and to carefully introduce them in the forms. The global cloud access solution will be based on our hybrid proposed text-image based solution, and will be completed by the X.509 certificates

Detecting DDoS Attacks in Cloud Computing Environment

This paper is focused on detecting and analyzing the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in cloud computing environments. This type of attacks is often the source of cloud services disruptions. Our solution is to combine the evidences obtained from Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) deployed in the virtual machines (VMs) of the cloud systems with a data fusion methodology in the front-end. Specifically, when the attacks appear, the VM-based IDS will yield alerts, which will be stored into the Mysql database placed within the Cloud Fusion Unit (CFU) of the front-end server. We propose a quantitative solution for analyzing alerts generated by the IDSs, using the Dempster-Shafer theory (DST) operations in 3-valued logic and the fault-tree analysis (FTA) for the mentioned flooding attacks. At the last step, our solution uses the Dempsters combination rule to fuse evidence from multiple independent sources

Detecting DDoS Attacks in Cloud Computing Environment

This paper is focused on detecting and analyzing the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in cloud computing environments. This type of attacks is often the source of cloud services disruptions. Our solution is to combine the evidences obtained from Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) deployed in the virtual machines (VMs) of the cloud systems with a data fusion methodology in the front-end. Specifically, when the attacks appear, the VM-based IDS will yield alerts, which will be stored into the Mysql database placed within the Cloud Fusion Unit (CFU) of the front-end server. We propose a quantitative solution for analyzing alerts generated by the IDSs, using the Dempster-Shafer theory (DST) operations in 3-valued logic and the fault-tree analysis (FTA) for the mentioned flooding attacks. At the last step, our solution uses the Dempsters combination rule to fuse evidence from multiple independent sources

The Overall Process Taken by Enterprises to Manage the IaaS Cloud Services

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) were the initial focus for cloud services and they are susceptible to a continuous adoption of cloud computing services, because of its strong advantages of accessing data from any place in the world over the Internet without concerning about the infrastructure used and the problems involved by the installation and maintenance processes. However, organizations need to consider simultaneously both risks and rewards within the decision making process, in order to assure an efficient expertise. SMEs represent the target group of this study concerned with the outsourcing process to Cloud Service Provider (CSP) considering the fact that the number of SMEs is greater than the number of large organizations, making SMEs the heart of economies worldwide (Sharma, et al., 2010; Van Hoecke, et al., 2011). The aim of the proposed research represents a qualitative analysis of the overall process taken by SMEs to manage the migration of their applications to Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). We conducted a literature analysis using papers released both by academic and practitioner bodies, in order to respond to the following two research questions: What are the steps involved in the migration process of the SMEs to cloud services? What are the stages required by each step of the outsourcing process? In this sense we produced a theoretical process, which includes a collection of the following interrelated activities: data analysis step, decision making step, migration step and management step. In an IaaS cloud service, the CSP supports the hardware related issues, whilst the software related issues should be identified by enterprises that want to migrate to cloud. Thus, this paper is first proposing to address an overview of the data analysis step. This constitutes the initial step of the overall process taken by organizations and it comprises: the analysis of cloud migration opportunities, the study of cloud adoption barriers and the examination of current infrastructure used by the organization. Further, another objective of this paper is to address the decision making step, which implies the following decisions: what information should be moved into cloud and who will access the information, what CSP the organization will choose and how the organization will manage the cloud services. The decisions will be made based on the analysis step. We assumed that the cloud service type was chosen (i.e. IaaS) and the cloud deployment model was selected as well (i.e. public cloud). Furthermore, the effective moving stage of enterprise’s assets into cloud services is the migration step, which includes two activities: developing the Service Level Agreement (SLA) and implementing cloud. In addition, the last step of the overall process is the management step, which is realized using two management functions: business and operational