Enforcing Security and Assurance Properties in Cloud Environment

Abstract

Before deploying their infrastructure (resources, data, communications, ...) on a Cloud computing platform, companies want to be sure that it will be properly secured. At deployment time, the company provides a security policy describing its security requirements through a set of properties. Once its infrastructure deployed, the company want to be assured that this policy is applied and enforced. But describing and enforcing security properties and getting strong evidences of it is a complex task.To address this issue, in [1], we have proposed a language that can be used to express both security and assurance properties on distributed resources. Then, we have shown how these global properties can be cut into a set of properties to be enforced locally. In this paper, we show how these local properties can be used to automatically configure security mechanisms. Our language is context-based which allows it to be easily adapted to any resource naming systems e.g., Linux and Android (with SELinux) or PostgreSQL. Moreover, by abstracting low-level functionalities (e.g., deny write to a file) through capabilities, our language remains independent from the security mechanisms. These capabilities can then be combined into security and assurance properties in order to provide high-level functionalities, such as confidentiality or integrity. Furthermore, we propose a global architecture that receives these properties and automatically configures the security and assurance mechanisms accordingly. Finally, we express the security and assurance policies of an industrial environment for a commercialized product and show how its security is enforced.

Software security models and frameworks: an overview and current trends

“…Therefore, it is important to ensure that code behaviour is in line with the access control [231], [232] policy. Further, a security assurance methodology is needed to obtain firm evidence that the security requirements of the companies are well defined and enforced [233].…”

Certification-Based Cloud Adaptation

“…For instance, authenticity can be achieved by providing either password-based or biometric authentication. In the literature, mechanisms are sometimes considered as part of complex property definition [10]; in this paper, we decouple property declaration (i.e., the property to be evaluated -( pr,l)) from its procedural definition (i.e., how to achieve property -mec) to better distinguish the goal and target of our adaptation technique. We consider different classes of properties such as security (i.e., CIA), performance, anonymity, consistency.…”

“…Each scenario has then been evaluated in 4 settings varying the remaining two parameters in (3,3), (3,20), (20,3), (20,20). Figure 3(d)-3(f) shows the execution time when two parameters among number of tenants, property classes, and levels, are selected and varied between (10,10) and (60,60) (step 10). Each scenario (10,10,10) and (60,60,60) (step 10).…”

“…Figure 3(d)-3(f) shows the execution time when two parameters among number of tenants, property classes, and levels, are selected and varied between (10,10) and (60,60) (step 10). Each scenario (10,10,10) and (60,60,60) (step 10). The execution time of the adaptation algorithm is linear when varying each single parameter alone (tenants, properties and levels), or a pair thereof; the overall complexity increases exponentially when all variables increase at the same time.…”