Modeling time, probability, and configuration constraints for continuous cloud service certification

Abstract

Cloud computing proposes a paradigm shift where resources and services are allocated, provisioned, and accessed at runtime and on demand. New business opportunities emerge for service providers and their customers, at a price of an increased uncertainty on how their data are managed and their applications operate once stored/deployed in the cloud. This scenario calls for assurance solutions that formally assess the working of the cloud and its services/processes. Current assurance techniques increasingly rely on model-based verication, but fall short to provide sound checks on the validity and correctness of their assessment over time. The approach in this paper aims to close this gap catching unexpected behaviors emerging when a veried service is deployed in the target cloud. We focus on certication-based assurance techniques, which provide customers with veriable and formal evidence on the behavior of cloud services/processes. We present a trustworthy cloud certication scheme based on the continuous verication of model correctness against real and synthetic service execution traces, according to time, probability, and conguration constraints, and attack ows. We test the eectiveness of our approach in a real scenario involving ATOS SA eHealth application deployed on top of open source IaaS OpenStack.

A trust assurance technique for Internet of things based on human behavior compliance

“…Traditional assurance solutions do not consider human behavior in the evaluation of data trustworthiness and, in turn, of the validity of the corresponding processes/applications. They rather implement a verification process where either the system or devices generating data are tested/monitored 5,11,12 , or the reputation of the entity owning the system or devices is evaluated. Both these approaches are however not viable in complex IT scenarios based on a multitude of smart devices for different reasons, which can be summarized as follows.…”

“…5 Di Giulio et al 22 compared cloud assurance/security standards to evaluate how much they fulfill current threats to cloud assurance. Anisetti et al 23 presented a trustworthy test-based certification scheme for the cloud that supports continuous assessment, certification adaptation, and a chain of trust grounded on the certification authority requirements, and extend it in the work of Anisetti et al 11 to support continuous verification of model correctness against real and synthetic service execution traces to guarantee certification process soundness. Lins and Sunyaev 24 analyzed whether certification can properly increase the user trustworthiness in using cloud services.…”

Stay Thrifty, Stay Secure: A VPN-based Assurance Framework for Hybrid Systems

“…We extend our assurance framework in (Anisetti et al, 2018), designed for the assessment of cloud systems, to satisfy the requirements in Section 2 and address the peculiarities of modern environments. The framework in (Anisetti et al, 2018), in fact, does not fully satisfy property extensibility and needs to be modified to target those private deployments not directly reachable from the outside (e.g., traditional private corporate networks and private clouds). The simplest solution of moving assurance controls to the private network, directly connecting them to the target system, is not viable because it would cause the violation of different requirements in Section 2.…”

“…The architecture of the new assurance framework is presented in Figure 1, adding three components to the one in (Anisetti et al, 2018): VPN Server, VPN Client, and VPN Manager. In a nutshell, different VPN Servers are installed within the framework, each one responsible to handle isolated VPN tunnels with client devices placed in the target networks.…”

“…A different solution has been given in our work in (Anisetti et al, 2018), where we described the cloud-ready framework briefly summarized at the beginning of Section 3. As already discussed, the proposed approach is based on probes and meta-probes, and fails to address requirements extensibility, noninvasiveness, and partially, safety.…”