Logging Solutions to Mitigate Risks Associated with Threats in Infrastructure as a Service Cloud

Abstract

Cloud computing offers computational resources such as processing, networking, and storage to customers. However, the cloud also brings with it security concerns which affect both cloud consumers and providers. The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) defines the security concerns as the seven main threats. This paper investigates how threat number one (malicious activities performed in consumers' virtual machines/VMs) can affect the security of both consumers and providers. It proposes logging solutions to mitigate risks associated with this threat. We systematically design and implement a prototype of the proposed logging solutions in an IaaS to record the history of customer VM's files. The proposed system can be modified in order to record VMs' process behaviour log files. These log files can assist in identifying malicious activities (spamming) performed in the VMs as an example of how the proposed solutions benefits the provider side. The proposed system can record the log files while having a smaller trusted computing base compared to previous work. Thus, the logging solutions in this paper can assist in mitigating risks associated with the CSA threats to benefit consumers and providers.

Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of Resource Scheduling and Security in Cloud Computing

“…Data privacy is still a big concern in other Models like Jerico Formu's Cloud Cube Model [17], Hexagon model [17], Multi-Tenancy Cloud Model [33], Cloud Risk Accumulation Model [34], and the Mapping Model [17], [33]. The logging approach [35] ensures that the log files can mitigate the risks to benefit both sides of accountability, security, performance, and scalability.…”

Security Analytics and Benchmarking Log Aggregation in the Cloud

“…Al. in this paper have addressed the number one threat defined by Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) that is the malicious activities that are performed in consumers' virtual machines/VMs which can compromise the security of the cloud consumers as well as the cloud service provides [4]. They have designed and implemented a prototype of a proposed logging solution in an Infrastructure as a Service cloud which records the history of the VM files belonging to the consumers.…”

SSM

“…These areas include cloud service performance [10], service cost [7], and security [5]. However, most cloud security models focus on security of Data as a service (DaaS) [2] and cloud storage [4] and overall security [15]. A few have covered the infrastructure level in some aspects such as performance and scalability [12] but not in security especially resource scheduling.…”