Matching Items (5)
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- All Subjects: Cloud computing--Security measures.
- Creators: Huang, Dijiang
Description
Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC) mechanisms have been attracting a lot of interest from the research community in recent times. This is especially because of the flexibility and extensibility it provides by using attributes assigned to subjects as the basis for access control. ABAC enables an administrator of a server to enforce access policies on the data, services and other such resources fairly easily. It also accommodates new policies and changes to existing policies gracefully, thereby making it a potentially good mechanism for implementing access control in large systems, particularly in today's age of Cloud Computing. However management of the attributes in ABAC environment is an area that has been little touched upon. Having a mechanism to allow multiple ABAC based systems to share data and resources can go a long way in making ABAC scalable. At the same time each system should be able to specify their own attribute sets independently. In the research presented in this document a new mechanism is proposed that would enable users to share resources and data in a cloud environment using ABAC techniques in a distributed manner. The focus is mainly on decentralizing the access policy specifications for the shared data so that each data owner can specify the access policy independent of others. The concept of ontologies and semantic web is introduced in the ABAC paradigm that would help in giving a scalable structure to the attributes and also allow systems having different sets of attributes to communicate and share resources.
ContributorsPrabhu Verleker, Ashwin Narayan (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Dasgupta, Partha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Security has been one of the top concerns in cloud community while cloud resource abuse and malicious insiders are considered as top threats. Traditionally, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) have been widely deployed to manipulate cloud security, with the latter one providing additional prevention capability. However, as one of the most creative networking technologies, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is rarely used to implement IDPS in the cloud computing environment because the lack of comprehensive development framework and processing flow. Simply migration from traditional IDS/IPS systems to SDN environment are not effective enough for detecting and defending malicious attacks. Hence, in this thesis, we present an IPS development framework to help user easily design and implement their defensive systems in cloud system by SDN technology. This framework enables SDN approaches to enhance the system security and performance. A Traffic Information Platform (TIP) is proposed as the cornerstone with several upper layer security modules such as Detection, Analysis and Prevention components. Benefiting from the flexible, compatible and programmable features of SDN, Customized Detection Engine, Network Topology Finder, Source Tracer and further user-developed security appliances are plugged in our framework to construct a SDN-based defensive system. Two main categories Python-based APIs are designed to support developers for further development. This system is designed and implemented based on the POX controller and Open vSwitch in the cloud computing environment. The efficiency of this framework is demonstrated by a sample IPS implementation and the performance of our framework is also evaluated.
ContributorsXiong, Zhengyang (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Dalvucu, Hasan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Cloud computing is regarded as one of the most revolutionary technologies in the past decades. It provides scalable, flexible and secure resource provisioning services, which is also the reason why users prefer to migrate their locally processing workloads onto remote clouds. Besides commercial cloud system (i.e., Amazon EC2), ProtoGENI and PlanetLab have further improved the current Internet-based resource provisioning system by allowing end users to construct a virtual networking environment. By archiving the similar goal but with more flexible and efficient performance, I present the design and implementation of MobiCloud that is a geo-distributed mobile cloud computing platform, and G-PLaNE that focuses on how to construct the virtual networking environment upon the self-designed resource provisioning system consisting of multiple geo-distributed clusters. Furthermore, I conduct a comprehensive study to layout existing Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) service models and corresponding representative related work. A new user-centric mobile cloud computing service model is proposed to advance the existing mobile cloud computing research.
After building the MobiCloud, G-PLaNE and studying the MCC model, I have been using Software Defined Networking (SDN) approaches to enhance the system security in the cloud virtual networking environment. I present an OpenFlow based IPS solution called SDNIPS that includes a new IPS architecture based on Open vSwitch (OVS) in the cloud software-based networking environment. It is enabled with elasticity service provisioning and Network Reconfiguration (NR) features based on POX controller. Finally, SDNIPS demonstrates the feasibility and shows more efficiency than traditional approaches through a thorough evaluation.
At last, I propose an OpenFlow-based defensive module composition framework called CloudArmour that is able to perform query, aggregation, analysis, and control function over distributed OpenFlow-enabled devices. I propose several modules and use the DDoS attack as an example to illustrate how to composite the comprehensive defensive solution based on CloudArmour framework. I introduce total 20 Python-based CloudArmour APIs. Finally, evaluation results prove the feasibility and efficiency of CloudArmour framework.
After building the MobiCloud, G-PLaNE and studying the MCC model, I have been using Software Defined Networking (SDN) approaches to enhance the system security in the cloud virtual networking environment. I present an OpenFlow based IPS solution called SDNIPS that includes a new IPS architecture based on Open vSwitch (OVS) in the cloud software-based networking environment. It is enabled with elasticity service provisioning and Network Reconfiguration (NR) features based on POX controller. Finally, SDNIPS demonstrates the feasibility and shows more efficiency than traditional approaches through a thorough evaluation.
At last, I propose an OpenFlow-based defensive module composition framework called CloudArmour that is able to perform query, aggregation, analysis, and control function over distributed OpenFlow-enabled devices. I propose several modules and use the DDoS attack as an example to illustrate how to composite the comprehensive defensive solution based on CloudArmour framework. I introduce total 20 Python-based CloudArmour APIs. Finally, evaluation results prove the feasibility and efficiency of CloudArmour framework.
ContributorsXing, Tianyi (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Sen, Arunabha (Committee member) / Medhi, Deepankar (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
This thesis proposed a novel approach to establish the trust model in a social network scenario based on users' emails. Email is one of the most important social connections nowadays. By analyzing email exchange activities among users, a social network trust model can be established to judge the trust rate between each two users. The whole trust checking process is divided into two steps: local checking and remote checking. Local checking directly contacts the email server to calculate the trust rate based on user's own email communication history. Remote checking is a distributed computing process to get help from user's social network friends and built the trust rate together. The email-based trust model is built upon a cloud computing framework called MobiCloud. Inside MobiCloud, each user occupies a virtual machine which can directly communicate with others. Based on this feature, the distributed trust model is implemented as a combination of local analysis and remote analysis in the cloud. Experiment results show that the trust evaluation model can give accurate trust rate even in a small scale social network which does not have lots of social connections. With this trust model, the security in both social network services and email communication could be improved.
ContributorsZhong, Yunji (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Dasgupta, Partha (Committee member) / Syrotiuk, Violet (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Cloud computing is known as a new and powerful computing paradigm. This new generation of network computing model delivers both software and hardware as on-demand resources and various services over the Internet. However, the security concerns prevent users from adopting the cloud-based solutions to fulfill the IT requirement for many business critical computing. Due to the resource-sharing and multi-tenant nature of cloud-based solutions, cloud security is especially the most concern in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). It has been attracting a lot of research and development effort in the past few years.
Virtualization is the main technology of cloud computing to enable multi-tenancy.
Computing power, storage, and network are all virtualizable to be shared in an IaaS system. This important technology makes abstract infrastructure and resources available to users as isolated virtual machines (VMs) and virtual networks (VNs). However, it also increases vulnerabilities and possible attack surfaces in the system, since all users in a cloud share these resources with others or even the attackers. The promising protection mechanism is required to ensure strong isolation, mediated sharing, and secure communications between VMs. Technologies for detecting anomalous traffic and protecting normal traffic in VNs are also needed. Therefore, how to secure and protect the private traffic in VNs and how to prevent the malicious traffic from shared resources are major security research challenges in a cloud system.
This dissertation proposes four novel frameworks to address challenges mentioned above. The first work is a new multi-phase distributed vulnerability, measurement, and countermeasure selection mechanism based on the attack graph analytical model. The second work is a hybrid intrusion detection and prevention system to protect VN and VM using virtual machines introspection (VMI) and software defined networking (SDN) technologies. The third work further improves the previous works by introducing a VM profiler and VM Security Index (VSI) to keep track the security status of each VM and suggest the optimal countermeasure to mitigate potential threats. The final work is a SDN-based proactive defense mechanism for a cloud system using a reconfiguration model and moving target defense approaches to actively and dynamically change the virtual network configuration of a cloud system.
Virtualization is the main technology of cloud computing to enable multi-tenancy.
Computing power, storage, and network are all virtualizable to be shared in an IaaS system. This important technology makes abstract infrastructure and resources available to users as isolated virtual machines (VMs) and virtual networks (VNs). However, it also increases vulnerabilities and possible attack surfaces in the system, since all users in a cloud share these resources with others or even the attackers. The promising protection mechanism is required to ensure strong isolation, mediated sharing, and secure communications between VMs. Technologies for detecting anomalous traffic and protecting normal traffic in VNs are also needed. Therefore, how to secure and protect the private traffic in VNs and how to prevent the malicious traffic from shared resources are major security research challenges in a cloud system.
This dissertation proposes four novel frameworks to address challenges mentioned above. The first work is a new multi-phase distributed vulnerability, measurement, and countermeasure selection mechanism based on the attack graph analytical model. The second work is a hybrid intrusion detection and prevention system to protect VN and VM using virtual machines introspection (VMI) and software defined networking (SDN) technologies. The third work further improves the previous works by introducing a VM profiler and VM Security Index (VSI) to keep track the security status of each VM and suggest the optimal countermeasure to mitigate potential threats. The final work is a SDN-based proactive defense mechanism for a cloud system using a reconfiguration model and moving target defense approaches to actively and dynamically change the virtual network configuration of a cloud system.
ContributorsChung, Chun-Jen (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Zhang, Yanchao (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015